Pumpkin and Tomato Laksa

The soup we had last night was very delicious, but it wasn't quite the soup described in this recipe. Not quite.

My alarm bells went off when I read that I was supposed to make a paste that included lemon grass. Lemon grass seems to be the one ingredient with which many cooks don't seem to be that familiar, at least that is what you start to think when you see how it is often used by non-Asian chefs. These fish cakes on lemon grass skewers is one example, the paste with lemon grass in this recipe is another.

Unfortunately, lemon grass is way too hard and woody to be chopped into a paste. A few years ago I attended a cooking workshop on Thai food, and they explained that lemon grass should only be used like bay leaf or a cinnamon stick.

So once I knew for sure that this paste wouldn't work (I like to give recipes the benefit of doubt), I started all over again, and made a paste of only garlic, ginger, chilli lime leaves and coriander leaves. This worked a lot better, only that it was too little mass even for my smallest food processor. Just chop all of the ingredients well and you'll be fine. The lime leaves you can either leave intact (as in Asian cooking), or remove the leaf vein along the centre and then chop them. I omitted the coriander roots as they might face the same issue as the lemon grass, and I used three dried bird's eye chillies for lack of fresh ones, which was just perfect for us. I still used the lemon grass, but I just cut it once (so I would fit in the pot) and simmered in the soup. And I used lime juice instead of lemon juice.

The pumpkin was wonderful, cooked yet with a bit of bite. Unfortunately, the cubes were way to big for in a soup. Either you need to cut them into smaller cubes after steaming, or you need to start out with smaller cubes, but then don't forget to reduce the steaming time!

DH thought that the coconut flavour was too strong; I think that was more likely because the pumpkin wasn't strong enough. I definitely would have liked the soup to have a stronger pumpkin taste - the pumpkin is actually only added at the very last moment. I would suggest using the water you used for steaming to make the stock, or use the stock for steaming and then fill up to 500ml again.