Easy (Cheat's!) Black Bean Sauce

Easy, tasty black bean sauce recipe - save yourself an absolute fortune on those tiny packets of stir fry sauces you get from the supermarket!

No need to buy those over-priced sachets from the chiller cabinet every again - all you need to do is slice up two chillies and grate some ginger, add a few more ingredients and you've got yourself over a litre of sauce that you can freeze which will make around twenty portions or so!

Not only that, if you buy yourself a six pack of Lee Kum Kee black bean garlic sauce (see here for where I get mine, affiliate link which won't cost you any extra), that's twelve lots of the below recipe, which is...erm...  around 240 portions, and it currently costs £12.60 for a six pack. So, if you do the maths, supermarket sachets or jars cost around £1 for a two portion serving (so that would be £120 for 240 portions), so for the price of a few chillies and some ginger root, and a few store cupboard ingredients, you are genuinely saving over £100 overall by making your own - I've even shocked myself working that out!!!

Anyway, without further ado, here's the recipe - oh, and I tried to take a photo of just the black bean sauce, but it just looked like a pan of black stuff (!), so I've used one of my photos of beef in black bean sauce that I've taken previously. I hope you enjoy it!

Easy Thai Red Curry Sauce

Thai red curry sauce is incredibly easy to make, and extremely tasty and fragrant.

 

Who doesn't love a spicy, warming Thai red curry, with all of the variations you can have, and the complexity of flavour.

 

 

Not only that, if you have Thai red curry paste in your fridge, there all kinds of other things you can make with it, such as Thai fish cakes, or crab cakes.

This quantity of sauce makes around eight portions. If you want to make a smaller amount, and a red duck curry for two, see here for my recipe.

Easy Satay Sauce

This is a delicious Thai version of satay sauce, that is ridiculously easy to make (and you can also freeze it) - try it, you won't be disappointed!

This is a scale-up of my original recipe, which also has a marinade for chicken skewers, and a recipe for pickled cucumber salad - the chicken and salad serve four as a main, or more as a starter - you can find the recipe here.

I found it beneficial to scale up, as then you use the entire tin of coconut milk, you don't have to stint on your portion of sauce if you're not limiting your calories, and it keeps really well in the freezer. And if you want to make your own Thai red curry paste, you can find my recipe here.