Quick and Easy Thai Green Curry (30 Minutes, Vegan)
- Updated on Aug 30, 2015
Download our free app Easy Vegetarian!
(4.7★, 100K+ Downloads in Google Play)
🥗 300+ High-Protein Recipes
📅 Grocery Lists & Meal Plans
🚫Totally Ad-free
The creation of this Easy Vegetarian Green Thai Curry recipe, and it’s accompanying post has been (from a writer’s perspective) one of our very most interesting to date. Let me explain…
When we first started HurryTheFoodUp waaaaay back in the day (last year) we made a simple mantra we wanted to follow. Our recipes had to be quick, tasty, healthy and meat-free.
So far, so good. But other, less obvious, points were hidden from us at that time.
Some were easy – all three of us naturally stayed away from recipes that included little known, or hard to find spices or herbs that would get used once then sit abandoned and forlorn in the cupboard, never to see the light of day again.
Wasting food is one of the western world’s biggest problems (one of I said!) and there’s no way we were going to add to that.
So when Howie said he still had a half jar of baby corn and a half pack of snow peas sitting in the fridge with nowhere to go, he’d made a valid point.
After all, he’d already made a big batch of the curry, for photographing, for eating, for force-feeding to housemates. So what to do with the rest?
Maybe we could make them optional ingredients, he suggested, and focus on the frozen veg instead?
No no, came the adamant response from Kat – these ingredients are an integral part of the meal.
What’s a green Thai curry without the sweet crunch of a baby corn, or the tender bite of a snow pea? It’s just not the same.
Which meant we had to find another way.
Indeed, it’s nearly impossible to make only recipes that use an exact amount of buyable ingredients (a market might help to combat this, but if you’re relying on supermarkets like we are then it’s pretty much a no-go).
So what to do? We put our heads together and here are some of the best options we came up with to avoid wasting food.
- Make huge batches and eat them for days.
You’ll certainly use up your ingredients, but run the risk of putting yourself off the meal for good (see last week’s White Bean Dip for an example). - Make huge batches but freeze the leftovers instead. This saves masses of time and means you’ll always have a tasty meal just waiting to be reheated when you have little energy or time to cook.
It’s very efficient with the only drawback being that not every dish is freezable. You’ll be happy to hear this curry is perfectly suitable for freezing. - Find other recipes that use the same, or replaceable ingredients.
This was the option that Howie plumped for in the end, and he made this delicious Fake Lo Mein and ensured not a single pea was thrown away.
There must be other ways to avoid wastage, but these were our favourite picks so far. We hope they’ve given you something to think about, and we want to know:
- Are you guilty of wasting food?
- Do you use any of the methods above? Which work best for you?
- Do you have any more tips or advice to help combat the millions upon millions of tons of good food thrown away every year?
Ingredients
- ½ cup brown rice (or basmati rice)
- 7 oz firm tofu (firm 7oz = 200g)
- 2 tsp vegetable oil
- 1 small onion
- 0.5 inches ginger, fresh (0.5 inches = 1.5 cm)
- 2 handful frozen vegetable (carrot, cauliflower, broccoli)
- 1 handful snow peas/ snap peas
- ½ cup vegetable broth (½ cup = 125 ml)
- ½ can low fat coconut milk (1 can = 15oz / 430ml)
- ½ tsp maple syrup
- 1 tsp green curry paste (vegan versions are very easy to find)
- Salt to taste
- 1 handful peanuts (or cashews)
Optional
- ¼ lime (juiced) (gives the curry a little "fresh/summer" kick)
Instructions
Tofu
- Cut the tofu into dice-sized cubes. Fry them for 10-15 minutes on medium heat in half the oil.
Rice
- Cook the brown rice according to package instructions.
Curry
- Peel and dice the onion and ginger. Use the other half of the oil and fry them in a pot on medium heat for a couple of minutes.
- Add the frozen vegetables and give them a few minutes to cook.
- In the meantime wash the snow peas and add them to the other vegetables in the pan.
- Then add the vegetable stock and coconut milk and let it all simmer for 10-15 minutes.
- Add the curry paste, maple syrup and salt to taste and let it cook for another 5 minutes.
- Finally add the nuts in the last minutes of cooking so they are still crunchy.
- Serve with tofu cubes and basmati rice on the side. Enjoy!
NOTES
*Sooo, we’ve used light coconut milk in this recipe to keep the calories below 600 kcal per serving. If you’re not looking at calories, feel free to go for the full fat coconut milk version.
Nutrition
Comments
Leave a comment below
40 comments
Thai and Mexican food are on the menu weekly in my house. I can’t wait to try this recipe!
Glad we could inspire you, Linda 😀
You take beautiful photos 🙂 This looks so delicious! Send me a bowl 😀
Thanks Ceara! 😀
Such a colorful dish and I love that it’s filled with veggies!
I think it’s so important to not waste food. And I love that not only are you NOT wasting food, but you’re making fabulous recipes from there. Can’t wait to try this delicious looking thai green curry!
Definitely a tricky thing not to waste food at time. But I think we found some good solutions 🙂
Thanks for reading, Kelly!
Great post! I love the recipe and the ideas behind it!!
I love Thai curries. This looks so creamy and delicious!
Deffo is both! 🙂
Thai green curry is my absolute favourite thing to eat! This recipe looks delicious and so creamy. I’ll definitely have to try this!
Ah, it’s sooo good! I have to give Kat all credit for this one. Pretty awesome show!
This came out like soup…what did i do wrong?
Hi Christiana,
so actually, it sounds like you’ve been doing it exactly right! Thai curries, unlike Indian curries, are often very soup-like. Much thinner and more liquidy. I hope it tasted good anyway!