Thai green curry rice balls.

Fried jasmine rice and Thai green curry balls with crispy basil. © Ryan Schierling

Around here we use the term "legacy" when referring to the yesterday's food and its delicious potential. Most folks use the designation "leftovers" but that seems so... unseemly. In this instance, I am referring to our last post and the recipe for Thai green curry. Make it, enjoy it, and save whatever remains for these delicious Thai curry balls.

You will need about two cups of chilled curry with plenty of tofu and vegetables from our Thai Green Curry with Fresh Tofu recipe. If you have few cups of rice from the day before, you may use that, but if it has been more than a day I would recommend making a fresh batch of jasmine rice. The only other items you will need are some additional coconut milk and panko breakcrumbs. Plus oil for frying, of course.

That's it. No eggs are necessary. The tofu acts as a moist binder on the inside – not to mention it being a great source of protein – and we use coconut milk instead of eggs to prepare the balls for breading.

Whether the aim is to make yesterday's Thai curry new again, or to simply sneak a bunch of vegetables into a beloved picky eater with the allure of fried food, we're all over these little appetizers. But calling them leftovers? I have no idea what you're talking about.

Better than take-out Thai green curry.

Thai green curry with tofu. © Ryan Schierling

I'm not sure why it's taken so long for me to finally write about this dish. Even with a fair number of requests for the recipe, we've never managed to detail how we make it. We've just made it. 

So, the few who have had it – in the spontaneous and informal space of an evening at home – have been friends stopping by the wee suburban cabin when no plans were made and there was no special occasion to celebrate. It represents to us the simple comfort of family and nourishment to warm the belly. 

How green curry came to be part of our repertoire is one of the earliest food stories that Ryan and I share. Before I moved into the bungalow next door to Ryan in Seattle – before we'd even met – I lived a short block away in a sweet, old third-floor apartment right above a Thai restaurant. Once every week or two I would either stop by or call in an order for pick-up. The were five or six dishes I particularly enjoyed, but the curry (especially the green curry) was my rich and delicious "usual" on a cold and rainy night.

Cold comfort.

Thai curry salad, three ways. © Ryan Schierling

The salad days of summer are here, and it's been a lengthy and hot season this go around. This week, in fact, Austin broke a record for consecutive days over 100º F – seventy days straight – beating the old record set in 1925.  So what do you do when you are suffering through Thai curry withdrawals and it's just too bloody hot outside to eat it the traditional way?

Well, we made salad.

Oh, but we didn't just make one kind. No, we had to try three different kinds... 

It's been a month turbocharged with ideas, but we seem to have suffered from insufficient time for setting all those creative impulses into motion. So, when we committed to making salads Thai curry-style, we didn't mess around; we just made them all. The red, green and yellow standards that are familiar in our home, just a little... cooler.

I tend to associate "comfort food" with hot food. Something that warms the belly and coddles the senses, and this was admittedly a wide swing in the opposite direction of my huge crush on the hot, hot deliciousness that is Thai curry. But, no matter! Sometimes one's source of inspiration gets tantalizingly trumped by curiosity and an inventive tangent.

Now, we stayed as true to the traditional elements used in each of these curries when served hot, but adapted as necessary for the freshness and texture we expect of a salad. In lieu of jasmine rice we used a delicate rice vermicelli. We decided to limit it to three basic ingredients in addition to the vermicelli, a traditional curry sauce and the amazing fresh Thai basil we are blessed to have happily at hand in our herb garden. Our other criteria was that each salad had to have something with a little crunch and be able to feature a starch or protein nicely. We chose vegetables that are as good fresh as cooked, and passed on the tofu – just this once. (Curry and tofu are most excellent companions, though, so we will totally try this with fried tofu one day soon.)

Adventure day.

Thai Fresh. © Ryan Schierling

Sundays are days off. Typically, historically, it is the only day Julie and I both share as a day together, a day of rest – so we try to create as much unrest as possible. We set out, we adventure. We cross things, locations, off our list.

We were southie Thai in our jaunty beginning today, craving something spicy, fresh and close to home. Just so you know, we bring a wealth of Pacific Northwest experience with "one-to-five" stars when ordering Thai food. So, we were a little surprised that both the green curry and the coconut vermicelli salad we ordered at Thai Fresh were extremely mild. This is Texas, and historically, stereotypically, Texans like things hot. Homemade green curry in this household is a fearsome, fiery beast, that will politely knock on your front door with a coconut milk, Thai basil, fish sauce and palm sugar smile, and then burn the house down and dance in the cinders. While solid fare, I imagine the Thai Fresh cuisine reflects the location and neighborhood, which is, training-wheels-on, exotic take-out experience that one can heat up in the microwave of one's expensive, relatively unused stainless steel kitchen after a long day at work. It is Thai, and it is local and very fresh, but you won't see too many Thai families making a trip to south Austin to eat there. It's certainly a valuable resource for south residents who want very quick Thai food in an convenient coffee shop/deli setting.

Curiosity satisfied, we moved north to MT Market with our A-level shopping list.

(L) Dragonfruit. (R) Goo Fish. © Ryan Schierling

I have friends that would walk through the automatic front doors at MT Market and balk immediately at the smell. It is… a foreign scent, an aroma that you don't associate with American grocery stores. Mostly (mostly) fresh fish, a big smack of fresh pork, beef and assorted offal, and some weird-ass pickled vegetables in tubs that I just can't stay away from. We are there for Vietnamese young green rice (com dep), Julie's strawberry cream biscuits, daikon radish and fat carrots, bird chiles and whatever else looks promising.

Julie gravitates toward fresh-cut-in-half durian fruit, picking it up, smelling it, making me smell it. She relates it to fine, sweet, stinky cheese. I am taken aback, recalling the Andrew Zimmern 'Bizarre Foods' episode where he visibly gags, choking on durian. Rotten onion fruit!?!? Anthony Bourdain apparently digs it, describes it as…"indescribable, something you will either love or despise. ...Your breath will smell as if you'd been French-kissing your dead grandmother." I don't want anything to do with that (just yet), so we move on, selecting some beautiful dragonfruit, sweet potato vermicelli and Maggi seasoning. Proper baguettes for banh mi are down the way at Baguette House.

After a bit of a layover at Goodwill in the housewares section, we drive back through downtown Austin proper and then point east on a single digit street with the intention of visiting Bits & Druthers for some English fish and chips and a bit of poutine. Frustratingly enough, the whole fickle food trailer park is closed, again. We tried last Monday, with no luck. Sunday, apparently, is no better, so we wind back downtown. And then as we are driving, after months without, the rains come. Brilliantly, dark blue clouds pull up, pull in, and surprise pedestrians, cyclists and motorists alike. The temperature drops 20 degrees, the humidity spikes, and a warm, wet blanket is plunked down on downtown Austin.

Owl bldg. © Julie Munroe

Wipers on, we decide on drinks, and perhaps a sandwich, at the Tiniest Bar in Texas, and Lucky's Puccias. The bar-side trailer, offering Italian wood-fired handfuls, is an unassuming respite with simple, well-thought ingredients. My sandwich is proscuitto-salty, mozzarella-creamy, tomato-acidic and arugula-spicy, all tucked in a smoky, fire-kissed envelope. Julie's vegetarian Rustica is a mild, delicate sandwich with simple flavors allowed to shine without heavy-handed embellishment. 

Lucky's Puccia, w/ Lone Star. © Ryan Schierling

Our garden is being watered for us, we have an open tab at a teeny, tiny bar (perhaps the teeniest, tiniest bar), and the puccias are warm and delicious.

It has been another good, good adventure Sunday, but now it is time to get home to the cats, and the laundry, and to make preparations for the week ahead. 

Tam, tum, tom.

Som tam. © Ryan Schierling

There are at least 43 different Thai recipes for green papaya salad. There are a couple different spelling variations (som tam, som tum, som tom). There are at least five very questionable heat indices ranging from extremely mild to solar flare/coronal mass ejection, depending on what restaurant you're at or where you get your bird chiles. 

We used to live a half block from a wonderful, family-owned Thai restaurant. While I am still a little hum-dingered that we didn't ask them for their Zion Chicken recipe before we moved to Texas, I will always give credit to them for introducing me to one of my all-time favorite salads, Thai or otherwise – green papaya salad. It was a wonderfully fresh blast of color and texture, exciting flavors, and I would order it every time we got take-out.

The only thing was, they didn't always have it on the menu – green papaya absenteeism, green papaya vacancy, green papaya truancy, straight-up green papaya hooky. When green papaya was out of season or otherwise unavailable, their stand-in julienne was carrot with more carrot and – while still delicious – that's just not my som tam, sir.