So a few weekends ago, our host dad said he was going to be making a curry soup for dinner. I was very excited for both the fact that we were going to have curry for dinner that night and that I was going to be able to watch him make it.
I had no idea what all goes into one of these soups that they kindly make for us for dinner,….but I suppose I should expect that something that tasted so delicious must have required some effort.
Anyway, Vonn showed me all the ingredients for the soup. He showed me the vegetables they use to grind up into curry powder. He showed me the actual curry plant that they chop up; it’s this brilliant orange color and only seems to get brighter when it was being ground up by hand with the mortar and pestle.
This particular curry soup was a fish one; and after making a fish broth by boiling a fish in the water…. He also ground it up with the curry using the mortar and pestle.
THEN later he grabbed some coconuts where the husks had been dried out. He cut them open – (we drank the juice inside) then he brought it over to this little contraption that he’s sitting on in the photograph… and then shaved the inside of the coconut by hand against a metal device to create the white shavings (which we as Americans are more familiar seeing coconut as) and put them all into one large bowl.
After that… he boiled some water and then covered another bowl with a cheese cloth…. Put the coconut shavings on top of the cheese cloth and then poured the boiling water over the coconut shavings. Then he rolled the coconut shavings into the cloth and tightly squeezed out every last bit of liquid until a creamy white coconut milk came out.
And that’s when I had one of those “Huh. OH THAT’S HOW THEY MAKE THAT” moments as I saw him squeeze the liquid out into the container. I think he smiled at my amazement and then I told him that we have the same thing in America, but we buy it in a can.
I made sure to tell him that this, made fresh in front of my eyes, I’m sure is much more delicious.
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