Thai Green Curry Sauce

Rather than purchasing a bottled sauce, I found two different recipes in my cookbook libraries to make a Thai Green Curry sauce. While the list of ingredients was sort of long, it is actually a pretty simple to make--as long as you have a blender and a good knife! It took me some time to find all the ingredients, but I really enjoyed my time at the Asian Market, wandering around, poking around the produce bins, peering at labels, and enjoying imagining what I could make with all these different flavors.

Ingredients:
3 large poblano chillis
2 medium Serrano chillis
10 fresh green Thai chillis
2 stalks lemongrass
bunch thai basil
1 shallot diced
3 garlic cloves
1 tbs fish sauce
1 tbs grated ginger
1 tbs grated galangal
2 tbs chopped cilantro
4 kaffir lime leaves
ground black pepper

Depending on how hot you want this, you can vary which peppers you use. The little Thai chilis are super hot, so they go pretty far, which is why I used a milder, larger chili like the poblano. I deseeded the larger chilis and roughly chopped them--the Thai chilis went in seeds and all, just the stems came off.

The garlic, ginger, and shallot are peeled--and I used a microplane to grate the ginger and galangal. Everything else is roughly chopped and tossed with the fish sauce (the original recipe called for shrimp paste, which I didn't have.)

 I used my blender and pureed it into a very smooth paste. This is a complex sauce, not just spicy, redolent of so many different flavors. This can be used in a number of different dishes--I used it in two different ones.