at least I made it look halfway pretty

Feast your eyes:

Alas, the dish looks better than it tasted. They say the key to good cooking is good ingredients, and that was certainly the case here. This was my first attempt at making an old favorite dish of mine, shrimp-and-chicken curry. The curry that I'd bought from the local grocer, though, turns out to be from New Jersey (Joizy!), and it sucks. I had to use dried basil because my own basil plants are growing so damn slowly that they won't be ready for weeks. So that sucked. The frozen shrimp that I used were the tiny, wimpy, flavorless kind; they also sucked. I used duyu (soy milk) instead of coconut milk, and that sucked... or at least it wasn't all that helpful. Oh, yeah—see those peas? They sucked as well. Those are typical Korean peas, which means they're hard as pebbles and just as flavorless.

I really need to get a sack of good old American-style frozen peas. Fresh basil, fresh ginger, real Indian curry, and a brace of well-hung shrimp would also be nice.


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