Currying Favor with Curry Flavor

It's Meatless Monday and I'm back to working out what to cook. Ed would be totally happy with a plate of vegetables (especially in the summertime – so long as it included sliced tomatoes). But I like to curry favor with him, so I've settled on cooking a pumpkin curry.

The basis for my creation is this recipe I found on Love & Lemons, but of course, I changed it around a bit as I am incapable of following directions.

I started with one of the buff colored Long Island Cheese pumpkins that I grew in my patch.

I sliced it in half and roasted it for about 45 minutes. Look at that color of its insides.

I also roasted the seeds and have been snacking on them all day.

Until a year or two ago, I could probably count on one hand the number of times that I had eaten curries. That was before our trip to Thailand, where I was enthralled with the multitude of delicious curries we were served.

I'm sure there is much for me to learn to make an authentic Thai curry, but, in the meantime, I've found a short cut: red curry paste that I find at the Shelbyville Kroger store in the Asian aisle. A couple of teaspoons is all it takes to warm up a dish with Thai flavors. It's made from a mash of red chilies, coriander roots and leaves, lemon grass, garlic shallots and galangal. (If you read the fine print, it also contains a bit of shrimp paste, which technically puts my Meatless Mondays in jeopardy. Yikes!)

To the curry paste, I added a can of coconut milk, a squeeze of lime and a teaspoon of the fancy salt/pepper blend that my friend Steve brought me from his recent travels to Spain. I cooked some brown rice, baked some tofu, and steamed some broccoli and green beans. 

I layered the rice, curry sauce, tofu and vegetables into our lunch bowls. It was both beautiful and tasty. The perfect lunch for cold fall day.