Okay! Although it's sometimes tempting to leave the odd thing out, the backbone flavours of this are the star anise (remove it when cooked); the lime, fish sauce (doesn't taste fishy); and the coriander. Like I said in earlier post - wind any ingredient up or down according to your family's tastes, but I would try to get all the core flavours in.

Re: the coconut milk - buy two 400 g tins and spoon off the thick cream into a bowl; use the thin milk towards the bottom to make spice paste


Spice Paste (sounds like lots of things but just all popped into the food processor):

Onion
2 x garlic cloves
large thumb of fresh ginger
green chili - maybe just a little to start with
few tablespoons of thin coconut milk to create liquid consistency
1 -2 tablespoons of garam masala or medium curry powder
tsp ground coriander
tsp ground cumin
zest of lime if you've got time (and a zester!)

other ingredients:

chicken (or just veg; or raw prawns - whatever)
corn oil
star anise
2 cloves
2 x tins coconut milk
2 sweet potatoes
peas - fresh or frozen
2 limes
fish sauce
black pepper
coriander
basil

1. Whiz spice paste ingredients in small bowl of processor, adding thin coconut milk to make slushy, stir in chicken pieces, coating everything; cover and leave in fridge.

2. When home, heat corn/sunflower oil; add chicken and all of marinade to saucepan. Don't worry about "colouring" chicken - doesn't matter. Just cook on medium heat, stirring, until everything is aromatic and the spices start to sing - about 3 minutes.

3. add remaining coconut milk; star anise (whole) and 2 cloves. Add cubed sweet potato (skin on or off) and peas. Grind in some black pepper - no salt at this stage; bring to light boil then simmer for 20 minutes.

4. The chicken and potato will cook through in about 20 minutes. If the sauce is thick, add water. Then add a little salt, a little sugar, and the juice of two limes. Add the fish sauce - you should aim for around 2 tablespoons, but maybe start your kiddies off on slightly less - depends how they take to it!

5. Roughly chop two large handfuls of coriander and basil and stir everything together, check seasoning, remove star anise, or wait for someone to find it on their plate, and serve with jasmine rice (best), or basmati (almost as good) or noodles (still pretty good!).

Hope they like it. I don't write recipes down much so if I made a glaring omission - apologies! x