Learn to make delicious farm-to-table recipes like this homemade Thai Curry using the vegetables you have on hand for a complete meal in 20 minutes.

Why I Love This Recipe

The question I get asked the most, besides how do I start my garden, is how do I use up all my garden produce?

The great thing about curry or “rice bowl meals” is that you can use pretty much any veggie you want! This makes cooking up all your garden produce so much easier because you don’t have to think about separate recipes for each item, and your garden produce isn’t going to waste.

Homemade Curry Recipe

Ingredients

Various vegetables from the garden (I like a combination of firm veggies and leafy green veggies, think about flavor combinations that will work well, but don’t be too timid about experimenting!)
Grapeseed Oil - or any other oil with a high smoke point.
Garlic - can you even make food without garlic? I think not!
Curry Paste - I recommend curry paste over individual curry seasonings (see below for more info).
Coconut Milk - this adds a deep richness and creaminess to the sauce, plus the extra fat in the coconut milk helps the flavors in the sauce to coat everything in the pan.
Soy Sauce - for that umami and salty flavor.
Lime juice - to cut through the richness and add another layer of flavor.
Fresh basil & cilantro - I love the pairing of fresh basil and cilantro to garnish my curry. Use whatever fresh herbs you have available to you! (Surprisingly, mint is also another great addition!)
Sesame Oil - for incredible flavor!
Protein - any protein will do, to keep this meal quick I like to use already cooked leftover protein like steak or chicken. A quick scrambled egg will work, too.
Jasmine Rice - white or brown rice will work, but I love the texture and flavor of jasmine rice, it also soaks up all that curry sauce in such a deliciously heavenly way.

Powdered Curry vs curry paste

If you’re using powdered turmeric or curry powder you’ll want to add those in at the early stages of cooking so the spices have time to cook in the oil and distribute throughout the vegetables.

I prefer using a curry paste that I was so happy to have found online. Curry pastes are a great thing to purchase premade because learning how to make your own is very time-consuming and the ingredients used are pretty hard to come by.

I also love using curry paste in my cooking when I’m not actually making a curry recipe. It has so many flavorful ingredients built right into it, and I happen to love the flavor on so many different dishes.

First things First - Cook the Rice

Whenever you’re trying to cook a meal in the least amount of time possible, you always have to stop and think about what item is going to take the longest to cook. For this curry recipe, that will be the rice. So go turn on the rice pot and get that started before jumping into veggie prep.

Preheat the Pan

You also don’t want to forget to preheat your pan when trying to cook quickly. So before I start prepping my veggies I’ll pop my great-grandma Myrtle’s cast iron pan on the stove and give it a good coating of grapeseed oil. (You can see me cook my great-grandma’s fried chicken recipe in this same pan here!)

PRO TIP: For speeding up your cooking, using something like a cast iron pan that doesn’t require pristine care when cleaning can really shave a few minutes off at the end for clean up time. Give it a good swish to remove any food bits, no soap required, then set it back on the burner to dry.

Chop and cook veggies

Another tip when trying to cook meals in a shorter amount of time is to reduce the size of the item you’re cooking. For meat, this could be slicing it up really thin, or for veggies, chopping them up into smaller/thinner pieces than normal.

When cooking a curry, you also want to start by cooking the veggies that will take the longest to soften up. You could basically say start with the “hardest” items in the pan first.

I’m slicing up my carrots and chopping up my garlic first, then tossing that into my preheated cast-iron skillet.

Also, consider that the stems of certain veggies like cilantro or swiss chard are much harder than the leaves themselves. So remove the stems and get them into the pan before the leaves so they have time to cook down a bit more and soften up.

PRO TIP: Keep a compost bowl handy so you can throw all your scraps into it for your animals (or into a plastic bag in the freezer for your next batch of stock).

Cook the Leafy Greens

At about 2-5 minutes left of the cooking time, you want to toss in your leafy greens and those veggies that will cook up very quickly. The goal is to just get them to wilt, you don’t want them to steam through or get soggy.

Coconut Milk

Once your veggies are cooked through it’s time to add the coconut milk. Carefully pour it into the pan to create a nice thick sauce. Coconut milk is traditionally used for curry because it adds a deep richness and creaminess to the dish, plus the extra fat in the coconut milk helps the flavors in the sauce to coat everything in the pan.

I’m not a huge proponent of exact measurements, so I add it in until I have enough sauce for my satisfaction.

Pick a Protein

Curry and rice bowls are a fantastic way to use up leftover protein. That’s what I’m doing in this recipe with some leftover steak.

Leftover chicken or pork work well, too. But if you don’t have any protein on hand, a few scrambled eggs will get the job done.

The meat will be added at the very end of the cooking time because all you’re really doing is heating it back up (or quickly cooking the eggs).

Soy Sauce & Seasonings

Add a splash of soy sauce at the very end for a bit of saltiness and umami! Don’t add the soy sauce at the beginning because overcooked soy sauce tends to get a strange, off-putting flavor.

Add in a splash of sesame oil and a squeeze of lime juice for even more flavor, then top it off with your fresh herbs.

Homemade Curry in 20 Minutes (Farm to Table Recipes)