Coconut Curry Roast Mini Pumpkins #FoodieExtravaganza

Just a few ingredients but I promise you that these coconut curry roast mini pumpkins are going to wow your family and friends. The hardest part is cleaning the pumpkins but these are so worth the time and trouble.

I’ve been mulling over this idea for quite a while just biding my time until the little pumpkins started showing up in my local supermarket. I love cutting larger pumpkins or butternut squash in wedges, seasoning them with spices, syrups and/or balsamic and roasting them, but it seems like a lot of the toppings just drip off without soaking in. Especially from the pumpkin wedges.

So I got to thinking. What if I filled small pumpkins and baked them whole? As you’ll see from the photos, a little bit of the coconut curry sauce did boil out and over, but plenty enough was left inside to make these guys absolutely delicious!

Coconut Curry Roast Mini Pumpkins

If your mini pumpkins have tender enough skin, you can eat the whole thing! Just cut them apart with a knife and fork. If not, serve with a spoon, for scooping out the tender coconut curry flavored pumpkin and sauce inside.

Ingredients to serve 2 – easily doubled or trebled, if you’ve got a pan and oven big enough!
2 mini pumpkins, about 1 lb or 450g each
1 (13.66 oz or 400ml) can coconut cream
2-3 tablespoons red Thai curry paste
Freshly ground black pepper

Optional for serving:
fried curry leaves
slices of fresh red chili peppers

Method
Scrub your mini pumpkins clean. Dry them off and then, using a sharp knife at an angle, cut the tops off. Remove any seeds or fibers from the tops and set aside.

Use a spoon to scrape all of the seeds and fibers from the inside of the mini pumpkins, making sure to get it all out, even from up around the top. I start with a normal spoon and then use a grapefruit spoon for a final thorough scrape.

Preheat your oven to 350°F or 180°C. Put your clean pumpkins in a baking pan. If you need to shave a tiny bit off the bottoms so they stand upright, please do, just be careful not to make a hole.

Pour your coconut cream into a large measuring cup so you have room to whisk. Add the Thai red curry paste. We like things spicy, so I add three tablespoons. Whisk briskly until the paste is completely dissolved in the coconut cream.

Pour half of the coconut curry sauce in each pumpkin. Sprinkle in a little freshly ground black pepper.

Put the tops back on the pumpkins so they fit snugly.

Roast in your preheated oven for 45 minutes then test for doneness. If a fork doesn’t go easily into the flesh of the pumpkin, roast for another 15 minutes.

Remove from the oven and leave to cool for about 5-10 minutes before serving. The coconut curry mini pumpkins retain the heat quite well and you don’t want to burn your mouth.

If desired, top with sliced red chili pepper and fried curry leaves.

Enjoy!

It's October so that means pumpkin recipes in honor of National Pumpkin Day on October 26th! Many thanks to our Foodie Extravaganza host this month, Lynda from Reviews, Chews & How-Tos.

• 15 Minute Ravioli with Pumpkin Cream Sauce from Faith, Hope, Love & Luck Survive Despite a Whiskered Accomplice
• Apple Pumpkin Bundt Cake (Vegan) from Veggie Fun Kitchen
• Butter Roasted Pumpkin Seeds from A Day in the Life on the Farm
• Chicken, Pumpkin & Bean Enchiladas from Karen's Kitchen Stories
• Coconut Curry Roast Mini Pumpkins from Food Lust People Love
• DIY Pumpkin Spice Latte with Almond Milk from Hardly a Goddess
• Low-Carb Pumpkin Scones from Reviews, Chews & How-Tos
• No-Bake Pumpkin Cookies from Caroline’s Cooking
• Pumpkin Saffron Rice from Palatable Pastime
• Roasted Kabocha (Japanese Pumpkin) Fries from Culinary Adventures with Camilla
• Vegan Malaysian Red Pumpkin from Sneha’s Recipe

Foodie Extravaganza celebrates obscure food holidays, and we all post recipes using the same ingredient. Posting day is always the first Wednesday of each month. If you are a blogger and would like to join our group and blog along with us, come join our Facebook page Foodie Extravaganza. We would love to have you!

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Spicy Beef Lettuce Cups

Spicy beef lettuce cups make a great main course but they’d also be fun as appetizers. Put the lettuce leaves and spicy beef in the middle of the party table and let family and friends help themselves.

A few weeks ago, my husband and I went out to lunch at a beautiful restaurant in the middle of a manmade oasis just off one of the main highways that crisscross Dubai. Al Barari is a verdant refuge from the dusty sandpit that surrounds it, with streams, lily ponds and waterfalls.

Its restaurant, called The Farm, has a wide variety of choices in the menu, a mix of western and Asian dishes, with a little Middle Eastern thrown in as well. I ordered the spicy Thai beef salad, which frankly, wasn’t very salad-like at all. It was pretty much all spicy meat with a few random slices of zucchini, but it gave me the idea for this dish. I would have liked some crunchy lettuce leaves to eat with it.

Spicy Beef Lettuce Cups

This was a quick, last minute dinner. Because I was hungry and didn’t have time for marinating strips of beef, I used ground beef. Worked beautifully! If your pan isn’t big enough for my method, feel free to tip the crispy cooked beef into a bowl before cooking the ginger, garlic, chili peppers, and then the onions. Add it back when those are done.

Ingredients
1 lb 2 1/2 oz or 525g ground beef – not low fat
Olive oil, as needed
1 fat thumb-sized piece fresh ginger, peeled and finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1-2 small red chili peppers, finely chopped
2 small onions, peeled and cut in wedges
1 tablespoon low sodium soy sauce
2 teaspoons fish sauce
1 tablespoon Chinese vinegar (substitute lime juice if you can’t find the black vinegar)

To serve:
2 heads baby cos lettuce, leaves separated, washed and dried*
1 small bunch cilantro, hard stems removed, chopped roughly
1 medium cucumber, seeds removed, cubed
extra minced chili, optional

*Save the smaller leaves and the heart of the lettuce for a salad.

Method
In a non-stick skillet, brown the beef over a medium high heat until crispy. Add a little olive oil, if necessary, to get it to fry. Beef in Dubai, even the beef that doesn’t say low fat, doesn’t seem to render fat out as it does in other places, so I do add some oil. (Also, my non-stick skillet isn’t as non-stick as it used to be!)

Once the beef is crispy, push it to the sides of the pan and turn the heat down to medium low. Add the ginger, garlic and chili peppers to the middle of the pan.

Again, if your beef hasn’t rendered much or any fat, drizzle in a little more olive oil. Sauté the ginger, garlic and peppers until they soften. Mix them in with the beef and then push it back out to the sides.

Add in the onion into the middle and turn the heat up slightly.

Cook the onions for just a minute or two, stirring well. You want them slightly cooked but still a bit crunchy. Mix them in with the beef. Remove the pan from the heat and add in the soy sauce, fish sauce and vinegar. Stir well to combine.

Leave the beef to cool for about 15-20 minutes. You want it slightly warm but not hot enough to immediately wilt the lettuce.

To serve, spoon the spicy beef into the lettuce leaves. Top with cucumber bits and some chopped cilantro. Add more minced chili, if desired.

I filled mine too full at first and they were a challenge to eat without spilling. A couple of generous tablespoons per lettuce leaf will do nicely. The very next day, as I was eating the leftovers, I also added avocado on top. Awesome!

Enjoy!

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Easy Fig Pecan Bars #CreativeCookieExchange

Sticky, chewy, fig pecan bars are the perfect treat with a cup of tea or an ice-cold glass of milk. Baked up in a large pan, this recipe makes enough to share, but they also freeze beautifully so you don’t have to.

Sometimes when I am looking for inspiration, I like to do a recipe search in a foreign language. If it’s one I don’t speak, I’ll use Google Translate first, to find the key words (and the word for recipe!) and off I go down the rabbit hole of an entirely different internet world. It’s quite fascinating. Think about it. That's the world those native speakers inhabit daily.

Even when it’s a language I do speak - English for instance - using the search term “British” or “Australian” along with my key words can reveal recipes I would never otherwise have found because often the same sorts of treats are called completely different things.

For instance, years ago, when we first moved to Australia, I discovered that our US cookie bars, that is, cookies that are baked in one pan and cut into squares or rectangles, are known as slices there. Like our bars, slices come in all flavors and sizes.

This month my Creative Cookie Exchange group is sharing cookies that are great for a bake sale, so my mind immediately went to bars (or slices!) They are so much easier even than drop cookies or roll cookies when you need to bake more than one dozen.

I was feeling flush with fresh fig preserves, having just made a new double batch from my grandmother’s recipe, so I did a quick search for “jam slice” and turned up, I kid you not, 31,700,000 results, most of which seemed to have coconut. So then I tried “jam bars” and got even more results: 68,300,000, most of which seemed to be made with oats. Not that the US bars didn’t have coconut on occasion or that the Australian slices didn’t use oats from time to time, but there is definitely a bias the other way. I find it all most intriguing. Yeah, I know, I know, I’m sad. On the other hand, I made you some excellent fig pecan bars today.

Easy Fig Pecan Bars

After all that searching, what I like to call researching, I ended up adapting a Taste of Home recipe they call Winning Apricot Bars. They are the perfect after school or bake sale treat! Use your favorite preserves or jam if you don’t have fig.


Ingredients
3/4 cup or 170g butter, softened
1 cup or 200g sugar
1 large egg
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups or 250g all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup or 150g finely chopped pecans
1/2 cup or 65g roughly chopped pecans
1 jar (10 to 12 ounces) fig preserves (or sub your favorite preserves) (about 1 3/4 cups) 528g

Method
Preheat oven to 350°F or 180°C and line a 13x8-in or 33x20cm pan with baking parchment.

My homemade fig preserves have whole figs in them so I used a pair of sharp kitchen scissors to cut them into bits, right in the jar. If you are using jam or fruit preserves in which the fruit is already broken down, you will not need this step.

In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the egg and vanilla.

In a small bowl, whisk flour, baking powder and salt. Gradually add the dry ingredients to creamed mixture, beating briefly in between additions and scraping down the bowl.

Fold in the finely chopped pecans.

Press two-thirds (about 530g, if you have a scale) of dough onto the bottom of your prepared baking pan.

Spoon the preserves onto the dough and spread them out evenly.

Mix the roughly chopped pecans into the remaining dough and crumble over the preserves.

Bake for 30-35 minutes or until golden brown, turning the pan around halfway through to make sure it cooks evenly.

Cool the fig pecan bars completely in pan on a wire rack. Cut into 24 bars to serve.

Enjoy!

• Ricotta Mini Chip Cookies from the Spiced Life
• Butter Cookies with Mocha Frosting from Karen's Kitchen Stories
• Easy Fig Pecan Bars from Food Lust People Love
• Cocoa Tahini Cookies with Sesame Crunch from All That's Left Are The Crumbs
• Anzac cookies from Flours and Frostings

Creative Cookie Exchange is hosted by Laura of The Spiced Life. We get together once a month to bake cookies with a common theme or ingredient so Creative Cookie Exchange is a great resource for cookie recipes. Be sure to check out our Pinterest Board. We post the first Tuesday after the 15th of each month!

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