Traditions always seem more important as the winter closes in. As the light diminishes so the rhythms of the year, marked by the round of festivities, seem to get louder. Towards the end of a hectic day working, I ended up excited like a child to quickly carve some pumpkins and put them on the front doorstep ready for the local trick or treaters. My Pinterest and Twitter have been full of classy, refined ways to decorate a pumpkin for the last week – all in neutral tones, fitting in with contemporary room schemes – but I wanted to hack away at some orange coloured flesh and make something fun and traditional – an approach I felt pleased with when one 8 year old announced that my efforts were “awesome”.
But I am a fraud – when it came to what to do with the pumpkin entrails, I went with something far away from tradition. The trouble is, I just find pumpkin bland, and so I decided to throw lots of flavour at this pile of pumpkin gore. The image of Thailand might conceivably be as far away from what we think of as a traditional “Halloween” as The Seychelles are from Lapland, but they sure know how to throw flavour at food in Thailand. And so my traditional pumpkin has been abused like Frankenstein’s monster, and turned into a creation which neither the Thai people nor our own would recognise as traditional. Now I am just waiting for a lightening bolt to see if it comes to life.
Ingredients:
1 large onion
25g butter
1 tbsp olive oil
2 cloves garlic
1 red chilli
3 sticks celery, sliced
1 large carrot, sliced
2 tsp red curry paste
The flesh of 1 medium pumpkin
Half pint chicken stock
Can of coconut milk.
Bunch of coriander, leaves finally chopped and stalks chopped separately
1 leek
1 tbsp fish sauce
Melt the butter over a medium heat with the olive oil. Add the onion and garlic and soften for 5 minutes. Add the chilli, then the carrots and celery and stir in. Add the red curry paste and keep stirring until all the vegetables are coated. Finally add the pumpkin flesh, chicken stock and corriander stalks. Simmer for 20 minutes, adding more water as necessary until the pumpkin flesh is soft. Then add the can of coconut milk and stir through.
While the soup is cooking down, I fry the leeks separately in olive oil over a medium heat, turning regularly. This is because I then whiz the rest of the soup with a hand blender before adding the leeks in whole. I think that food is partly about presentation and texture, and the green of the pieces of leek contrast a bit with the rest of the soup. Once I’ve mixed in the leeks I season and add fish sauce to taste – beware that the fish sauce is salty in itself so don’t overdo the salt – it will depend on your stock how much you will need.