Having coffee and talking with (listening to) fellow school Mums can be a broadening, enlightening, embarrassing, funny experience and somehow or other food and recipes are in the mix well and truly. Again, food is such a unifying thing!
Today I discovered that some soups I cooked for the school teachers a few weeks ago are still being talked about. So, with that encouragement, the cold weather and being told I HAD to include some recipes, I am sharing my recipe for Thai Curry pumpkin soup, although not with the 4kg quantity of pumpkin I used for the teachers’ lunch! (and yes pumpkin is more than animal feed).

Thai Curry Pumpkin Soup     Serves 4 usually

Ing:
2 tsp vegetable oil                      Water
1 kg peeled Jap* or Kent pumpkin cut into chunks.
1 – 2 tablespoons of Thai red curry paste
1 vegetable stock cube
1 tbs palm sugar or brown sugar
270ml lite coconut milk
1 kaffir lime leaf
2 tsp fish sauce ( I did not use this when cooking this as a vegetarian dish)
1/3 cup chopped coriander
1 tsp grated fresh ginger

Method:
Heat oil in a saucepan and gently fry 1 tbs of the paste for a minute (add more paste later to taste as pastes vary in heat).
Stir in pumpkin chunks so they are covered in paste. Add enough cold water to just cover pumpkin. Add stock cube.
Bring to the boil, add lime leaf then simmer until pumpkin is almost tender. Take out lime leaf.
Pour in coconut milk.
Add fish sauce and sugar. Continue to cook until pumpkin soft. Stir and taste to see if extra paste needed.
Take off heat, add ginger. Puree with hand blender or in jug blender, being careful of molten blopping puree.
Stir through chopped coriander.

Spicy, warm, orange deliciousness.
*I use Jap pumpkin as it tends to be sweeter in flavour. Choose deep coloured flesh. Nothing worse than an anaemic pumpkin! Actually there is–anaemic chocolate crackles.