Creamy Butternut Curry

This started out as a "clear the fridge" recipe to use up a load of scraps, but it blew me away with how good it tasted. As described, it is quite mild, but if I make it again I would add perhaps a tablespoon of chili powder at the frying stage.

Some relatives had visited, bringing a home-grown butternut and their first harvested garlic, so I wanted to use those as the focus of a recipe. Some vegetables which had been lying around too long, plus some of my freezerful of chicken stock formed the rest of the main ingredients.

The inspiration to add green beans came from this recipe, while the idea of the carrot came from this Instructable, and the use of stock from this Instructable.

The ingredients are shown in the picture above.

1 butternut squash
2 bulbs of garlic
1 carrot
1 tomato
1 onion
1lb (500g) of frozen green beans
1 tin of coconut cream
3 tablespoons of Thai red curry paste
Splash of rice-bran oil for cooking (or other high-smoke oil)
1 tablespoon of soft brown sugar
Chicken stock
Handful of cooked chicken

The squash gets very coarsely chopped, into a dozen or so pieces and the seeds get scraped out and discarded. Then toss the pieces of squash in a baking tray with half the oil and put them in the oven.

Using this Instructable recipe as the basis, I roasted the squash first. I gave it one hour in a 300F (150C) oven which was plenty.

I chopped the carrot and simmered it in some chicken stock until it was soft.

Once the squash was squashy, I took it out of the oven and let it cool briefly before scooping the flesh off the skin using a teaspoon.

The flesh of the squash, plus the carrots and the stock in which they had been cooked, were blended to a smooth puree.

I peeled the onion and chopped it into chunks which would blend, then peeled all the garlic cloves and dumped them in the blender too. There's no need to clean all the squash/carrot mix out of the blender first: just scrape all you can get easily.

Blend the alium to a smooth slop and then fry that, plus the Thai red curry paste in some hot oil.

Once the onion has softened and the curry paste is fragrant, add in the pureed squash and carrot and mix it together.

Then realise that the pot is too small and decant into a larger one.

Then I added some scraps of roasted chicken meat which were cluttering up my freezer and the coconut milk.

The tomato was peeled and coarsely chopped and added, along with the sugar.

The bot was brought to a slow simmer, and then the frozen beans were added and everything was stirred together and left for twenty minutes.

Once the beans had been cooked in the curry, it was served on brown rice with a couple of sprigs of corriander.