Thai Pumpkin Peanut Curry Soup

Tomorrow is October 1st!

I've been thinking about this - is there anything I don't like about October?

Hmmm...

Rainy days? Nope. I actually enjoy a good rain.
Cold weather? LOL! I'm a northerner - I love cold weather.
The aspens turning gold? Ahh...
The approaching snow? Snow in the air puts a smile on my face!

I even love the pumpkin spice everything!

But today, as I work furiously to meet my deadline for my Fall 2020 release, Softly Blows the Bugle, I'm sharing a rerun recipe from 2014 for my favorite pumpkin dish. Something a wee bit different than the norm...

Thai Pumpkin Peanut Curry Soup


Jan here, with a pumpkin recipe that's a little bit different....

I LOVE pumpkin breads, pumpkin pie, and all the traditional pumpkin spice recipes, but sometimes a girl just wants some Thai food.

Spicy Thai food.

Delicious spicy Thai food.

And we live 700 miles away from my favorite Thai restaurant. Sigh.

So since it's October and time for everything pumpkin, I thought I'd share this recipe with you.

Thai Pumpkin Peanut Curry Soup
four servings, preparation time about 25 minutes

Ingredients:
2 Tablespoons oil (I use coconut oil, but olive oil works just as well)
3/4 cup chopped onion
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 or 2 small Yukon Gold potatoes, cubed, to make about 1 cup
3 Tablespoons Thai Curry Paste (red or green - I used green)

2 cups chicken or vegetable stock
1 cup water
1 15-ounce can pumpkin puree
3 Tablespoons smooth peanut butter
salt and pepper to taste

Note: Like most soups, this recipe is very versatile. You can leave out the peanut butter if you need to, use vegetable broth instead of chicken, use russet potatoes instead of Yukon Gold, use pie pumpkins the way Virginia taught us here.... Make the recipe your own! :)

In a 3 quart sauce pan, heat the oil over medium heat, and then cook the chopped onions until they're soft.

Add the garlic, potatoes and curry paste. Cook, stirring constantly until everything is blended and the curry paste is fragrant - about 3 minutes. Mmmm...it's smelling good!

Increase the heat to high, and add the broth and water. Once it starts boiling, turn the stove down to low, partially cover, and let the soup simmer for 15 minutes or so.

Remove the pan from the heat and add the pumpkin and peanut butter. Stir until it's all blended, and you're ready to go!

I love this soup because of the blend of flavors - the slight sweetness of the pumpkin with the heat of the curry paste is fabulous!

Another way to serve this would be with a dollop of sour cream or plain yogurt in the bowl. Heavenly creaminess :)

Have a great Monday!

Jan Drexler spent her childhood dreaming of living in the Wild West and is now thrilled to call the Black Hills of South Dakota her home. When she isn’t writing she spends much of her time satisfying her cross-stitch addiction or hiking and enjoying the Black Hills with her husband of more than thirty-seven years.

Easy Baked Garam Masala Tilapia

Happy weekend, everybody! Mary Jane here with a fun fish recipe. We first had this at a local Thai restaurant and we've been trying to reproduce it for a long time! I think we've finally got it down. 
But first...
                                                           
I love these spring flowers! I know flowers last a lot longer outside but flowers in the house make me so happy. :)

                               
For a friend's birthday party, we all decorated flower pots and filled them with flowers for her porch. She's such a good sport! Ten mismatched pots!!
                                                     
I love this one my daughter made. My favorite colors, too!

So, on to the recipe. This is one of those dishes you'd never think to put together because the ingredients are so... random. But the result is quite delicious!

 First, garam masala, one of our favorite seasonings! Use it to make a dry rub for the fish. You can also sprinkle it into melted butter and brush it on the fish if you prefer.

 Ignore how giant this jar of peppers is... The original recipe had picked Thai peppers which were VERY hot. I personally don't like the flavor of jalapenos but everyone else does so, there ya go. Dice about ten slices or one whole pickled pepper.

 The cheese needs to be a nutty, slightly bitter cheese like Swiss or Jarlsberg. Since we had Jarlsberg, we used that. Cut into very thin slices, enough to cover the top of the fish.
Bake the fish at 350F for ten minutes or until done. Remove it from the oven. Add the peppers and Jarlsberg and sprinkle on some fresh basil. Place back into the oven for about four minutes or until the cheese has melted and the peppers are heated through.

 Ta-dah! A fish curry that does take a lot of time and no frying in oil. We've tried it before with a little garlic and lemon, and it's even better with the garam masala.

Have a wonderful weekend and be sure to stop by my author pages at Mary Jane Hathaway or Virginia Carmichael to find out all my book news!

Thai Curry

Missy Tippens

This is a late post! How are the days slipping by so quickly? I missed posting at my regular time. I'm sorry!

So today I'm quickly sharing a new sauce I discovered. I love Thai food, love curry. And this packet made a quick and easy meal the other night.

I had made a chicken stir fry and used some powdered curry in it. But I had wanted to make something with more sauce but had forgotten to buy coconut milk. Then when I served the leftovers, I remembered this sauce in the pantry. It really made the leftovers creamy and yummy!

So if you like a quick curry, look for this type sauce packet to keep on hand. And for those of you who've mentioned never having curry before, this would be a great way to try it. This particular one was very mild. Some are spicier, so be sure to buy what works for you.

I hope you all have a great weekend!

www.missytippens.com

Another Tippens Kitchen Disaster

Hey, everyone! Missy here to share another cooking disaster with you. :) I guess I have no pride. LOL

First, I bought some beautiful wild caught North Carolina shrimp. I decided I wanted to make a curry dish. I started with a Ree Drummond recipe from Food Network. Coconut Curry Shrimp.

I started by peeling and de-veining the shrimp. I had a pot of water ready to heat for the boil-in-bag rice. But my hands were messy, so I asked hubby to turn on the burner.

WELL… he turned on the wrong burner. He turned on the one that had the bag of rice sitting on it! Which, I didn't notice immediately. But then I started smelling something bad and turned to find the plastic melting on our ceramic burner. I immediately reacted by grabbing the bag, which, of course, had a big hole in it by then so dumped the family sized bag of rice on the red hot burner. (Wish I had thought to get a photo!)

My poor husband felt awful as I quickly scraped the rice off the burner and tried to salvage most of it (except for the grains that were blackened or stuck to plastic). And if you thought burned food was hard to clean off a cook top, well, melted plastic is ten times worse!

Anyway, I rescued enough rice to add to the boiling water on the CORRECT burner. And I set about cooking the shrimp.

Melt 2 Tbs. butter in a skillet. Then add the shrimp (I had about ¾ pound). Cook 2-3 minutes, turning halfway through. Don't overcook it!

Beautiful!

Remove the shrimp to a bowl or plate. Add the onion (I used about half a sweet onion) to the skillet and cook until translucent. Then add a couple of cloves of chopped garlic. Then sprinkle on ½ to 1 TBS curry powder (to taste) and cook a couple of minutes.

Reduce heat to medium and add the coconut milk. I don't know how much I added since I used it from a carton rather than a can. But I probably used about 2 cups.

BUT (warning, there may be another kitchen disaster coming)…

But something smelled funny. So I tasted the sauce. And it was TERRIBLE. ICK.

I went looking for the cause, and my lime juice was way past expiration. Plus, the honey smelled off.

So, oh joy, I threw the sauce away and started over. I'm so, SO glad I hadn't added the shrimp yet.

BTW, if you're lucky, you can skip the step where you start all over again. LOL

Since I was starting over with NO lime juice and NO honey, I decided to wing it. I grabbed some cashews and an avocado I had been thinking of using anyway.

Remove the pit by slapping a knife into it and twisting. Then good luck getting the pit off the knife! :)

Quarter the avocado, and slice cubes right in the skin. Then once it's cubed, scoop it out of the skin. You have a nicely cubed avocado.

So I added the shrimp to my new batch of sauce, then added in the cashews and avocado.

Then I stirred in the almost-burned rice (and prayed there were no plastic chemicals in it!). :)

Believe it or not, it tasted pretty good! But boy, what an ordeal. I'm hoping my next cooking adventure doesn't involve melted plastic, burned rice grains or bad ingredients. :)

NOW, my PSA: Go check all the dates on your rarely used items!

And (adding to what Ruthy said yesterday): The contemporary novella collection, Coffee Shop Romances, has now released as well!!

www.missytippens.com

Epic , Quick, and Easy Thai Chicken Peanut Noodle Dish

Hello, everybody! The Fresh Pioneer is back and I've got a super quick Thai dish to warm up your February weekend! (And if you add extra red pepper flakes, it could reallly warm up your night.)

 First things first:
1/2 cup fresh peanuts
1/2 cup green onion
one lime
1 can water chestnuts
1 cup sliced bell peppers
2 tsp Thai seasoning you can find in the produce are of your grocery store
1 tsp dry garlic (or fresh)
 1 cup peanut sauce (I'll also post a super quick recipe to make your own sauce, but I had this in the cabinet so, I opened it up. It was pretty tasty!)
1-2 lbs pounds of sliced chicken breasts
Your favorite Asian noodles

The peanuts can be found in bulk and keep pretty well.

 I'm not a fan of water chestnuts but my kids are so... here they go.

 I just love this stuff. I've used it in so many dishes since I bought it and it only needs a few teaspoons. All natural and certainly saves money when I was buying this ingredients fresh, in the middle of winter!

 I love this stuff. My husband prefers fresh garlic for his home salsas so we always have that on hand, but for pan frying, I really like the way the dried garlic gives off a nutty aroma. YUM.

 OK, here's a quick peanut sauce recipe if you don't have a bottle of this on hand:

 1/4 cup creamy peanut butter

 1/2 cup chicken broth

 1/4 cup lemon juice

 1/4 cup soy sauce

 4 teaspoons  hot  sauce 

Whisk all those together in a saucepan on medium until the peanut butter is thoroughly incorporated. 

 OK, here's the chicken. (Sorry, Kav. Gruesome, eh? Imagine this is tofu, which I've had in this dish and it's super tasty.) Slice and brown in a pan until cooked through.

 Slice peppers, green onions and any other veggies you'd like to add. I like onion but one of my kids asked me to skip it and so i did, this time.

 Take the chicken from the pan and add a few Tbs of oil, dried garlic, and the Thai seasoning. Let it heat up and then add the peanuts, bell peppers, green onions. water chestnuts, other veggies (I had some snow peas in the fridge so I added those). Stir on medium high heat until bell peppers are sauteed.

 Add the cooked noodles, the diced and cooked chicken. Add the peanut sauce and toss gently.

Serve with a slice of lime and a small bowl of red pepper flakes if anyone wants to add extra zing. Since we have several kids who hate spicy food, and several who love it, it's best to serve most of the heat on the side.

  OK, I hope everyone is having a warm and productive February! I'm almost done with my latest book and I'm so excited to reveal it...  as soon as I can!

Thai Pumpkin Peanut Curry Soup

Jan here, with a pumpkin recipe that's a little bit different....

I LOVE pumpkin breads, pumpkin pie, and all the traditional pumpkin spice recipes, but sometimes a girl just wants some Thai food.

Spicy Thai food.

Delicious spicy Thai food.

And we live 700 miles away from my favorite Thai restaurant. Sigh.

So since it's October and time for everything pumpkin, I thought I'd share this recipe with you.

Thai Pumpkin Peanut Curry Soup
four servings, preparation time about 25 minutes

Ingredients:
2 Tablespoons oil (I use coconut oil, but olive oil works just as well)
3/4 cup chopped onion
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 or 2 small Yukon Gold potatoes, cubed, to make about 1 cup
3 Tablespoons Thai Curry Paste (red or green - I used green)

2 cups chicken or vegetable stock
1 cup water
1 15-ounce can pumpkin puree
3 Tablespoons smooth peanut butter
salt and pepper to taste

Note: Like most soups, this recipe is very versatile. You can leave out the peanut butter if you need to, use vegetable broth instead of chicken, use russet potatoes instead of Yukon Gold, use pie pumpkins the way Virginia taught us here.... Make the recipe your own! :)

In a 3 quart sauce pan, heat the oil over medium heat, and then cook the chopped onions until they're soft.

Add the garlic, potatoes and curry paste. Cook, stirring constantly until everything is blended and the curry paste is fragrant - about 3 minutes. Mmmm...it's smelling good!

Increase the heat to high, and add the broth and water. Once it starts boiling, turn the stove down to low, partially cover, and let the soup simmer for 15 minutes or so.

Remove the pan from the heat and add the pumpkin and peanut butter. Stir until it's all blended, and you're ready to go!

I love this soup because of the blend of flavors - the slight sweetness of the pumpkin with the heat of the curry paste is fabulous!

Another way to serve this would be with a dollop of sour cream or plain yogurt in the bowl. Heavenly creaminess :)

Before I go I want to say a word about last week's ACFW conference. Of course I had a wonderful time - one of the highlights was giving our own Mindy a big hug :) But most important? Meeting and talking with my editors and agent face to face. There's just something about that personal connection that can't be duplicated in an e-mail!

Have a great Monday!