Vegetable Curry with Rice

Lunch & Dinner

Apr 23

As you know by now, I love curry dishes. I’ve got five-plus curry recipes on my website: cashew chickpea curry, vegetable chickpea curry, Thai chicken curry coconut soup, and many more! **For those who are not familiar, curry is an Indian delicacy that is full of flavor and richness. Curries have been a staple of eastern cuisine for centuries and, according to this post on Sukhi’s Indian Cuisine, while no one really knows when curry was invented, “the use of spices in a sauce to flavor meats has been tracked back to 2500BCE from Mohenjo-Daro.” From there, it is assumed that curries were spread across Asia and Europe via Indian monks traveling via the Silk Route. Now, we see curry flavors in dishes all across the world.

During our quarantined time in Florida, we are separating our Saturday and weekend nights from our weekdays by using that as the one night for take-out. We’ve been continuously supporting one of our favorite new local restaurants, Stage Kitchen, which has an Indian influence and some of the best curry I’ve ever had. We’ve been on a serious rotation of their curry varieties (coconut shrimp green curry, cauliflower red curry, braised short rib curry, and much more), and it inspired me to make a classic vegetable red curry over brown rice.

To make this dish, I included an array of vegetables: carrots, eggplant, bell peppers, zucchini, garlic, onion, and mushrooms. Obviously, you can add whatever you are in the mood for or remove anything you personally don’t prefer! To provide a curry flavor, I turned to my pantry staple – curry paste. After trying many, and I mean many, different kinds of curry pastes, I continuously turn to this one as my favorite. Plus, it is typically available in just about every grocery store I’ve ever been to. I also rely on spices like cayenne pepper, red pepper flakes, curry powder, and, of course, salt and pepper. For more on what curry powder is composed of, I recommend checking out the piece on Sukhi’s Indian Cuisine I highlighted above. The dish I am making here most closely identifies with a popular East Asian curry (a Japanese curry) that is a rich curry sauce served over rice. For the thickness, I like to use canned coconut milk, which can also be found at most grocery stores. In this specific curry, we needed some extra liquid and, without more coconut milk available in our house, I turned to tomato soup and honestly was impressed with the result. It helped bring that tomato flavor and also thicken the dish. This is where a “mess-up” can sometimes be a “fix-up”. Something I had never tried before but definitely something I will add to my curry regiment in the future!

To make this dish, start by mincing the garlic and chopping all of the remaining vegetables into ¼ - ½ inch pieces. In a small pot, begin cooking the rice. In a larger pot, add the avocado oil and, once hot, the garlic and onion. Sauté for around 5 minutes or until it is fragrant and the vegetables are translucent. Then, add in the curry paste and mix well. In this large pot, add the remaining chopped vegetables and season with the spices. You will sauté these veggies until they are slightly crisped on the exterior and cooked through on the inside. With all of the sautéed vegetables, add in the coconut milk and tomato soup and stir to combine everything. Cover the pot and cook, on a low-medium heat, for around 30 minutes so that the flavors develop and the vegetables fully cook through. I prefer to serve the rice and curry separately so that people can make their own bowls, but if you prefer to serve one large pot of everything, add in the rice and mix to combine. Serve hot to enjoy immediately or allow to cool and then place in the fridge in Tupperware to enjoy later in the week. Either way, it will be delicious!