Coconut Archives - Nerds with Knives

Red Curry Chicken Meatballs

June 13, 2024August 26, 2019 by Emily

This Thai-influenced dish delivers big flavor for very little work. Tender oven-baked chicken or turkey meatballs, simmered in a delicious coconut milk-based red curry sauce. Packed with ginger and garlic and showered with fresh herbs, this is a guaranteed crowd pleaser.

It’s been made clear to us that we don’t talk enough about balls on this blog. This must be rectified. Because there’s nothing quite like the culinary experience of shaping a firm ball, baking it to meaty perfection and then slathering it with lashings of hot creamy sauce. And if you think we started with that sentence just to titillate and excite you, as well as improve our search engine rankings, you couldn’t be further from the truth, although those are two very good reasons. The fact is, we’ve only assembled four meatball recipes in the last six years of Nerds with Knives, and we felt that it was time to give those balls another gentle squeeze and/or spin. So here we go.

Coconut Key Lime Cupcakes

June 15, 2024March 5, 2016 by Emily

These coconut key lime cupcakes titillate your tastebuds with light, tropical flavors and look pretty dang party, too.

It’s hard for me to believe but it’s true; today is the 3-year anniversary of Nerds with Knives. I know we act immature, but we are, in fact, toddler-aged. *Throws a cupcake at your head and licks frosting off the floor*

Who would have thought that a blog whose scintillating early posts had titles like “My Kettle” and “In Case You’re Wondering If You Can Boil A Pre-Sliced Ham In Coca Cola. Answer; You Can’t,” would make it 3 whole years. We’re as shocked as you are but somehow we’ve managed to keep this sputtering, mildly out-of-control train on the tracks. Yeah, us!

But really all thanks go to you, our readers, who we love and adore. If it wasn’t for your positive feedback, I’m sure we would have given up ages ago and would most likely have picked up some other, less respectable hobby. Like knitting. Or taxidermy.

Shrimp and Corn Coconut Curry with Noodles

June 10, 2024August 21, 2015 by Emily

Shrimp curry is easy to make, and we flavor it with coconut milk and add fresh corn for a summery touch, but you can make this all year round!

While I love hot dogs and hamburgers and all those great American summer favorites, I find that by August I’m actually kind of bored of them. That’s when I crave something completely different, something that will wake my tastebuds right up.

Something like this fiery red shrimp curry, made silky by coconut milk and topped with lots of bright herbs like mint, basil and cilantro. We made it with wild-caught North Carolina white shrimp because they looked amazing at the market but you could easily swap them out for chicken thighs or breasts (cut into large bite-sized chunks), tofu, even chickpeas would be a delicious vegan option.

Sweet corn is in peak season right now and while it lasts I add it to just about everything, but it really does work incredibly well here. Corn and shrimp are a classic pairing but with the curry sauce, it’s crazy good. If fresh corn is not in season, frozen works perfectly well, too.

Five-Layer Magic Bars

June 15, 2024June 12, 2015 by Matt

Five-layer magic bars made with coconut, chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, and toasted pecans held together by condensed milk on a graham cracker crust.

I sometimes have a tricky time starting these posts, and true to form, for this recipe I got stuck on the very first word of the post title. FIVE-layer magic bars. Is it really five layers? Or is it three? Or four? Honesty in cooking is pretty important, right? There are certainly more than (but not MUCH more than) five ingredients, and you do assemble the bars in neat layers, so really, it can be as many layers as YOU think it is. Or you can just make them and not worry too much about it.

We made these to take to a local bake sale last weekend called For Goodness Bake. This is the third year that it has been organized, and each year the proceeds go to a different worthy local cause. This year it was the Green Teens, an offshoot of the Cornell Cooperative Extension which teaches farming, gardening and other food-related skills to local teenagers.