Easy panang-style Thai curry

Thai curries are some of my favorite foods. This recipe is super easy and uses only 1 pan, so it's perfect for weekday dinners. It's even better the next day, so we'll make extra for leftovers. Is it authentic? No. Is it yummy? Absolutely!

This is one of the times where you actually should get all the ingredients out and ready before you start cooking. You'll need 2 cans of light coconut milk, red curry paste, roasted red chili paste, Gourmet Garden chili pepper spice blend (this stuff is great -- find it in a tube near the fresh herbs), brown sugar, fish sauce, extra chunky peanut butter, 5 basil leaves, a package of 3 chicken breasts and fresh or frozen veggies of your choice.

Start with a little oil in a big, deep skillet. Add 4 or 5 heaping spoonfuls (little spoon, not your soup spoons) of jarred red curry paste and fry it until it gets fragrant. Add the cream from the coconut milk can (the white stuff at the top, not the watery stuff at the bottom) and continue to cook the paste, stirring like crazy until the paste and coconut cream are combined.

Next add the chili pastes and cook and stir until combined. Then 2 heaping soup spoonfuls of crunchy peanut butter. Cook and stir until combined. If the sauce starts getting too thick, add some more coconut cream to thin it out.

Then a couple of tablespoons or brown sugar and several good dashes of fish sauce. Cook and stir until combined. Starting to sense a theme here?

Last thing is the remainders of the coconut milk cans. Now you should have a delicious light orange curry soup. Time for the chunky bits!

Tear the basil leaves in half and toss them in. Next goes in the 3 sliced up chicken breasts. You'll want these pieces to be bite sized and sliced as thin as you can get them because you're basically just boiling the chicken in the curry. Pieces that are too thick will have a less desirable texture. A sliced red bell pepper is pretty and compliments the curry flavor nicely. For more variety I sometimes use frozen stir-fry vegetables. Simmer until the chicken and vegetables are cooked through. How long? Depends on how hungry you are. The longer the curry sits, the better it is. You can eat in 10 minutes, but it will be better if you let it slowly simmer for 20 (or more.)

Serve on top of jasmine rice, and as Jeff says ... dinner!