Recipe – Shrimp Curry

A few week’s back I was trying to find something to cook with what I had at hand, and I decided to prepare a shrimp curry based on an old recipe I had in my archives for ages. The curry had a coconut milk base, and I thought I had picked up a can recently. I remembered that it was impossible to find locally and thought that it was now available until I found out, after opening the can, that it was sweetened coconut water used to make drinks like piña colada. When I noticed that, I decided to change the recipe a bit to accommodate the extremely sweet goop that was in the can.

The recipe called for curry powder and I substituted for an entire box of Japanese hot curry in cake form. The box has one large chocolate-bar-shaped cake of curry paste, divided into 5 parts, and I started with 3 of them, and finally decided to use the entire box to cut through the sweetness with a bit of heat. It turned out surprisingly tasty, even though the leftover frozen uncooked shrimps were not very good. You could easily substitute some nice cubed chicken breast instead to make an easy and cheap meal out of it.

Ingredients

1 pound raw shrimps, shelled, deveined, and cut in 1/2" pieces
1 package hot Japanese curry
1 cup chicken stock
3/4 cup sweetened coconut milk
1 cucumber peeled, seeded, and diced
1 small red onion finely diced
1 tbs butter
2 limes, juiced
1" piece of fresh ginger peeled and finely diced
Salt to taste

Preparation

1. Sauté the onion in the butter until the onions starts to take color
2. Add the ginger and salt and stir in for a minute
3. Add the chicken stock and the curry cakes and dissolve while stirring, simmer for 10 minutes
4. Add the sweetened coconut milk and the lime juice and bring to boil
5. Add the shrimps and the cucumber and simmer until the shrimps are cooked, around 3-5 minutes
6. Serve over a bed of steamed rice

Lucito