Dinner ideas: Thai Chicken Curry

One of the challenges I've found about being dairy and soy free, is coming up with ideas for dinner. There are tons of non-dairy, non-soy dinner ideas out there, but I get so hung up on what I can't have, that I have a hard time coming up with ideas for dinner. Not sure if you all have had that same challenge, but I thought I'd start a series with ideas for dinner, in case you find it helpful too.

Tonight I had some leftover roasted chicken, and not a lot of time to make dinner. I also had a can of coconut milk in the pantry. I did a quick online search and decided to try making coconut curry with chicken. It was fast, easy, and tasted great. You can easily add more veggies and/or leave the chicken out, depending on your tastes.

Thai Chicken Curry

recipe adapted from Epicurious.com.

• 1 14-ounce can unsweetened coconut milk, whisked to blend
• 1 1/4 teaspoons Thai curry paste
• 1 large red bell pepper, cut into 1/3-inch-wide strips
• 1 medium onion, thinly sliced
• 1 pound chicken, cooked and shredded (I used leftovers from a roasted chicken)
• 1 tablespoon (packed) brown sugar
• 1 tablespoon fish sauce
• 1 cup chopped seeded tomatoes
• 1/3 cup thinly sliced fresh basil
• 1 tablespoon fresh lime juice
• Salt, to taste

Bring 1/4 cup coconut milk and curry paste to boil in large skillet over medium-high heat, whisking constantly. Add bell pepper and onion; sauté 5 minutes. Stir in chicken, remaining coconut milk, sugar and fish sauce. Heat through, stirring often, about 5 minutes. Stir in remaining 3 ingredients and simmer 1 minute. Season with salt. Server over rice.

You can also add other veggies - I through some sliced zucchini in with the tomatoes and it added a nice pop of green color and tasted great.

Tasty Scones

This weekend I had some leftover sweetened MimicCream that I wanted to use up, so I decided to try it out in baking (something I hadn't done before). I wanted to substitute it 1:1 with cream in a recipe, to see how it tasted, and I needed it to be in something sweet, since the MimicCream was the sweetened version. I decided to make scones, and after some looking online, I found an Alton Brown recipe with good reviews. My 3-year-old and I whipped up a batch with minimal modifications. The end result - really tasty scones that I would definitely make again! In fact, I had my husband try one, and he really liked it. And I should note that he hates nuts, and confirmed that you could not taste the almonds or cashews in the MimicCream.

Overall, I was really impressed with the baking ability of the MimicCream. The only disappointment was in the recipe itself - these are not traditional scones - they really seemed more like a sweet biscuit, but they were still really good hot out of the oven, and heated up in the toaster oven the next day.

Note: I have found MimicCream at Whole Foods. If you can't find it locally and want to give it a try, you can get it from Amazon.com.

Dairy and Soy Free Scones

recipe adapted from Alton Brown's Scone recipe

Ingredients

• 2 cups flour
• 4 teaspoons baking powder
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 6 tablespoons Spectrum brand shortening
• 3/4 cup Sweetened Mimic Cream
• 1 egg

Directions

Heat oven to 375 degrees.

In a large mixing bowl, combine flour, baking powder, and salt. Mix well. Cut in shortening. In a separate bowl, combine Mimic Cream with beaten egg then add to dry ingredients. Turn dough out onto a floured surface. Roll dough out and cut into biscuit size rounds. Bake for 15 minutes or until brown.