Curry Beef with Candlenuts

If you are feeling that I have been cooking of late, you are right. When I was running through the list of bakes and cooks I have put up on my blog, I realised @@ so many bakes but the list of cooks are barely a few. Geez, I need to learn to cook more. Mr G has been rambling on and on about that one, not that he is not one to fancy desserts but like the mother had mentioned before, would you want to feed your hubby desserts for his main dish? @@ Yeah right, mother!!

Anyhow, I had marked this recipe up on Patsie Cheong's Curry Flavour for a long time. It's only now that I was looking through my book shelves that I realised this was left there for a long time. So I told Mr G, let's go get some spices as I had run out of some of them. He smiled and said, are you cooking curry? He's smart!

My modifications to Patsie's recipe are in blue.

Ingredients A:

500g lean beef (cubed or cut into smaller pieces)
50g candlenuts (buah keras), ground
100g shallots (sliced) I blended them
50g garlic (sliced) I blended them
3 stalks lemongrass (sliced)

Ingredients B:

50g curry powder
100g chilli paste (This can be quite spicy so alter according to your taste)
30g curry leaves (I used about 10-20g curry leaves which is about 4-5 sprigs of curry leaves)
30g coriander powder
1/2 tsp turmeric powder
3 tbsp water

Ingredients C:

salt to taste (I used light soya sauce)
2 pork stock cubes or beef stock cubes
sugar to taste (I used about 1 tbsp brown sugar)
1 cup water

Method:

1. Heat 1/2 cup oil in pot, stir fry Ingredients A and B until fragrant.
2. Add Ingredients C and turn to low heat.
3. Cover the pot and simmer for 20 minutes. If your beef cubes are in bigger chunks, cook for longer on low heat to avoid burning the beef.
4. Remove curry beef and serve with rice.

**You do not need coconut milk for this dish but if you prefer, you may replace 1 cup of water with 1 cup of coconut milk.

Check out Mr G's plate!!

Mr G just kept eating while I asked if the dish is nice. He gave me a quick thumbs up but I was too slow to take a picture.

Nevertheless, I am submitting this dish to Little Thumbs Up hosted by Miss B of Everybody eats well in Flanders, organized by Zoe of Bake for Happy Kids and Doreen of my little favourite D.I.Y.

Also, I'm submitting this dish to Cook-Your-Books #1 for June hosted by Joyce of kitchen flavours.

Anyhow, on a separate note, there is a blog hop event coming up in July - Cook like a Star. If you have seen Masterchef and envision yourself or even dream of wanting to be like any of the Masterchef hopefuls, perhaps you can start right here. For July, the celebrity whom we are going to cook or bake with is Curtis Stone - one of the guest chefs on Masterchef Australia.