Tomato Pasta Sauce

I think in many places it’s actually cheaper to buy pre-made sauce than to buy the tomatoes to make it yourself. Why is that? Anyway, homemade sauce is worth the effort. This is what I’ve come up with, but it’s sort of a work in progress.

Thai Eggplant Curry

This is not an authentically Thai dish because Thai people would probably use chicken or pork in something like this and it would be more like a soup. It still tastes very Thai. The coconut milk and red curry paste really make this delicious. Thai curries and Indian curries taste very different, so it’s strange that their both “curries”. I guess the reason is that they both use mixes of spices sometimes called curries. Anyway, don’t try using a yellow curry powder instead of the red curry paste, it’s completely different! (I hope I’m not insulting your intelligence) You can find the red curry paste in a small jar in the Asian foods section of most grocery stores. It’s often from Thai Kitchen. We peeled the eggplant because the skin was tough, but maybe your eggplant won’t need peeling.

Mekong Riverweed with Cheo Bong

I apologize for showing you delicious food that you can’t have unless you’re in Laos, but it’s an interesting food and you should have it if you’re ever here. This riverweed is a special kind found in the Mekong near Luang Prabang. It’s dried there with sesame seeds and sometime tomatoes and garlic.

Mulberry Batida

James grew up in the Dominican Republic, so that’s why we call this a batida rather than a smoothie, but it’s really the same thing. James makes a batida of some kind to drink with lunch most days. Sometimes he throws in other fruits too like papaya, mango, or just leaves it banana flavored.

Spontaneous Tomatoes

Although I haven’t done any gardening in our yard, except for a few pots of herbs, we have the biggest bush of tomatoes I’ve ever seen!

It’s great to have fresh tomatoes that you don’t even have to work for. It is a little tough to pick them though because the mass of plants is so big that it’s hard to reach the middle of them without squashing other tomatoes! These are the ripe tomatoes that I found today:

I also buy tomatoes at the market because we go through a lot of tomatoes, mostly for pasta sauce.