Coconut Curry Broth Bowls

Description

What do you get when you mix a soup and stir fry together?  A broth bowl!  If you’re not quite familiar with a broth bowl, you’re in for a treat! Broth bowls are a dish in which a shallow pool of broth is served around rice and topped with just about any veggie and protein option you can come up with.  While you can adopt just about any flavor profile for a broth bowl, I’ve chosen to go with a coconut red curry topped with tender chicken and savory bok choy. While this dish looks complex, it’s much easier to put together than you would think.  The first step of this recipe is to start your broth off strong by sauteeing ginger, garlic, and chiles.  Once your aromatics are fragrant, a generous amount of red curry paste is toasted to bloom its flavor for the most delicious broth.  After the addition of coconut milk and broth, a good simmer is necessary to get all your flavors to come together.  While your broth simmers, use this time to prepare your chicken and bok choy.  Preparing the bok choy doesn’t get any easier, all it needs is a wash and rough chop and it's finished with a dash of soy after sauteing.  The chicken, however, needs some extra attention in order to velvet.  Velveting chicken is one of my absolute favorite ways to prepare chicken for any ramen or stir fry recipe.  This technique uses oil, cornstarch, oyster sauce, and baking soda to tenderize your chicken.  Have you ever had Chinese takeout and wondered how they get their chicken so tender and succulent?  Velveting is the answer.  The process of velveting your chicken should take a little over 20 minutes from start to finish, which makes for perfect timing with your broth.  Once your chicken is finished, simply create a little island of rice in your bowl (I like a large shallow dish), and put a couple ladles of broth around your rice and top with some chicken and bok choy.  This is an incredibly versatile dish too, using the broth as your main base, you can swap out just about any protein or veggie you like.  Once you make this comforting and delicious broth bowl, you’ll surely add it to your regular dinner rotation.  Speaking of comforting, I’ll tell you about a time that was anything but comforting.  A friend of mine found herself in a pinch one day with a serious emergency on her hands along with her diabetic pet tarantula, Tina that needed to be watched.  Since it was only a couple of days, I decided to be a good friend and volunteered to help out.  Tina  needed insulin two times a day along with belly rubs to calm her spidery nerves.  This was no task I wanted to take on being a lifelong arachnophobe and all, but I wanted to be a good friend and help out.  The time for Tina’s first injection came and I steeled myself harder than I ever thought possible and awkwardly positioned her into a position where I could administer the injection followed by belly rubs.  After a couple of days, Tina returned home to her owner and I was officially free from tarantula nurse duty.  I won’t ever say I miss giving a tarantula diabetic injections and belly rubs, but at least I can be proud of a completely new and unexpected skill set I was able to hone in on.  After a couple of days of tarantula care, I seriously needed something delicious and comforting, and that’s when I made my first ever Coconut Curry Broth Bowl.