Recipe - Pumpkin Curry Pasta

Had my mom coming over for dinner, and needed to come up with some unique gastroanomaly to serve.  She's always bragging to me about how when she goes to my brother's place, they dine on these crazy delicious and adventuresome dishes like Hamster Cheeks in Brown Butter, or Roasted Goose wearing a sweater knit out of bacon. 

A quick survey of the fridge comes up with an odd ingredient ... pumpkin.  What can I do with you, my friend?  I had once tasted a pumpkin ravioli that was very nice, but the supper hour was fast approaching and pasta takes too much time.  Perhaps another style of pasta?  Somewhere in the pantry is a bundle of squid ink spaghetti.  But I quickly determined that the combination of blackish-gray spaghetti noodles with an orange sauce would become the grossest looking thing to ever grace a plate.  I opt for mixing some cavatappi and ricotti noodles together as we have one serving of each of them remaining.  Grabbing the 2 boxes of pasta and the coconut milk I needed for my sauce, I head to the cooktop to see what I can produce. 

I dropped about 2 tablespoons of pumpkin into approximately 3/4 of a cup of coconut mik.  I played with that ratio till I got the pumpkin intensity/color I was looking for.  How to season this?  Im not sure if it was due to the influence of the colour of the pumpkin, but my mind immediately jumped to curry.  Problem is, aside from olives (more on this later) and beer, curry is the one thing that my wife doesn't like.  I gave it much thought.  I really tried to think of something else.  But like a drunk reaching for his favorite bottle, it was muscule memory that guided my hand to the curry jar.

But I really didn't use much curry.  Just enough to give it an essence of a land that, to the best of my knowledge, has never grown a pumpkin.  Maybe a half teaspoon of medium yellow curry powder.

*taste*

Not bad.  Needs a kick.  How about some sort of spice? I remember a Thai green curry paste I had in the fridge.  Yes!  I put in a pea-sized granule, as I know this stuff has some legs to it.  Perfect.  Rootiness of the pumpkin, smoothness of the coconut, aroma of curry #1, and the heat from curry #2.  But it needs something more...

Sweetness.

What do I use for that?  Brown sugar? Molasses?  What would my brother do? Hmm.  He would have had sugar cane flown in from Hawaii the week before.  My options are more regional.  Honey!  I grab the lavender honey and give the sauce enough to just round out the sweetness.  I decide that I had best mix this together ahead of time and serve it "pasta salad" style.  It was very nice. And even my wife had a small second helping!  And I'm willing to bet that if I went home right now, that the leftover portion that we put in the fridge became her lunch.

I served it with tilapia fillets.  I heated up the broiling pan ahead of time, dusted the fillets with a simple lemon pepper, brushed with olive oil, and did them in the oven.  This preparation was fine for the family, but mom deserved something better.  I decide to do a tapenede of sorts.  Olives, lemon, olive oil, russian mustard, and cashews.  I originally tweeted this recipe with pecans, I think.  I am correcting myself now.  I mashed this all together and put it on a couple of the fillets.  Winner.  It was delicious.

To round out the vegetable content, I sauteed young asparagus in olive oil I had flavored with garlic. Take that Kris! 

It was nice to have the company of mom for a fun meal.  Soon she'll be back in Regina.  Maybe there's time for one more inventive supper...