Coconut Curry with Chilli Rice

35/70


Another curry from the cookbook as we hit halfway in the project. This one has a thai feel to it and uses red curry paste as well as coconut milk to produce a very tasty curry indeed. We really liked the rice in this recipe too and having made more of an effort with it really made a difference.


This is the curry and rice cooking - you need to be able to multi-task for this recipe to be effective:

This is a close up of the rice which is cooked as per packet instructions before being added to stir fried spring onions, fresh chilli and frozen peas in olive oil:

And finally this is a picture of the rice and curry served together:

This curry uses steak strips which gives a hearty beef curry feel to the dish. The flavours are fantastic and the heat was just right for me (with 2 tablespoons of paste and a whole red chilli in the rice) although Mr O would have preferred a little more. I would say it is medium heat but do use less paste if you prefer your curry milder.


I really liked the cherry tomatoes, dessicated coconut and coriander added in right at the end, they kept their fresh flavours by adding so late in the cooking process and the sweetness of the tomatoes worked very well with the heat of the sauce.


This is a fairly simple curry, onion and garlic are softened before the paste is added, the steak strips are then stir fried into the mixture before the coconut milk is added and the whole thing is simmered. The trick is then cooking the rice alongside the curry. I ignored the recipe's instructions to start the rice once the curry is simmering and actually started it at the same time as I browned off the onion/garlic. This meant that the rice was cooked by the time the simmering stage was reached and I simply left it in the pan keeping hot until I needed it.


The rice itself was very nice, just enough bite and flavour from the spring onions, chilli and peas to make it more interesting than plain steamed rice and it worked very well to enhance the flavours in the curry.


In terms of weight watchers points, this works out at 14 propoints per portion including the rice which is pretty good. I should point out though that the recipe calls for 300g of rice for 4 people but I used 240g as I know that a 60g portion is plenty per person and accounts for 6 propoints. I also used reduced fat coconut milk to shave some further points off.




The 14 points per portion are broken down as follows: rice (6), quorn (2), coconut milk (3), dessicated coconut (1), oil (1), curry paste (1). 


This is a very satisfying and flavoursome meal which we really enjoyed, it is slightly more complex to make than other recipes within this book but well worth the effort. At 14 points per portion it is definitely one which we will be making again.


We give this a 9/10.