It is unofficially autumn, which means its time to start cooking with pumpkin. The dreary weather we were experiencing earlier this week had me craving something warm & hearty, so of course my thoughts turned to curry.The first ingredients I knew I would be using, aside from (canned) pumpkin, were the leftover Chinese bacon dashi from a couple weeks ago and little Vietnamese pork sausages from Viet Tofu. (These sausages are amazing, bursting with the flavors of garlic, ginger & lemongrass. Also, unbeknownst to me: palm sugar! Frying these was a sticky situation, literally.)
I started looking through my cookbooks, assuming a Vietnamese or Thai pumpkin curry would be found in (the astonishingly beautiful) Thai Street Food or one of my cheapies. No such luck. I ended up searching through The Complete Asian Cookbook–a great, comprehensive resource to have in your kitchen if you cook Asian food frequently–and found a beef & pumpkin curry in the Burmese cuisine section. The recipe is an adaption of that, with some Vietnamese inflection. The countries do not even share a border. I suck at geography, but the curry is pretty damn good.
N.B. The recipe presented below includes pork, but the recipe can very easily modified as vegetarian/vegan. I would suggest using mushrooms or maybe eggplant in place of the meat in this dish.
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