Big Curry Noodle Pot

In a little over a month, Heidi Swanson's new cookbook, Super Natural Every Day,  is coming out.  I am very, very, VERY tired of waiting for it.  She's posted an image of some of the pages, but you can't read the words beyond the title.  Very recently she posted a sampler PDF of six recipes from the book.  (I've already made one, but more on that later.)  I'm mostly caught up with her website - I've made probably 50 or 60 recipes from it, and while I have a few on the list, I'm waiting for more inspiration.  Out of all the food blogs I read (see the sidebar for my list), Heidi's is my favorite.  It got me started cooking, fueled my love of natural ingredients and whole grains and fresh produce, and continues to inspire me with new recipes every week or so.  While I'm waiting for the book to come out, I've been going through her last book, Super Natural Cooking, looking for some fun things to try.

I made the Big Curry Noodle Pot from the book partly because we have been eating a lot of Thai curry over the past few months, and partly because of the recommendations on the 101 Cookbooks Library.  I happened to have everything on hand except the peanuts, which only required a quick trip around the corner.  It worked out well for a weeknight.  Now that I've tried it as-written, there are a whole bunch of things I'd love to try out with this.  Most importantly, it was not spicy enough.  The recipe calls for some Thai red curry paste as well as turmeric.  Too much turmeric, I think, and not enough curry paste.  I might try out some red curry powder instead of the turmeric, or just more of the paste.  I would also like to try this with chicken or shrimp.  The tofu was better left over than it was right after I'd made it, but I still am just not a huge fan of home-cooked tofu.  Plus, Ken does not like it.  I think chicken would be a better fit than shrimp here, but either could work.  One last idea - instead of chopping the onions, I'd like to try them thinly sliced instead.  The noodles fought the onions for fork space, and the length of the noodles gave them an advantage.  It was difficult to get much onion, or if you did, there weren't many noodles.  I think thinly slicing them would make it easier to grab a bunch of each.