eight acres of eden: Curry for a Crowd

My daughter is going on her first missions trip to Thailand at the end of this year and to prepare her taste buds our family has been enjoying my first experimental curries. I'm not too fond of overly hot or spicy food, however, having now cooked up quite a number of these curries over the past few months, I have to say that green and red Thai curry pastes are now an essential item on my shopping list. Large bags of rice - it is not that hard and quite a crowd pleaser! You serve curry with rice - for us that is nutty, flavoursome, nutritious, low GI brown rice. My children all love curry except when I was a little too daring and upped the curry paste one day - they were all grabbing their water glasses at once, I knew I had gone too far! I have made this dish in my large wok and yesterday I threw all the ingredients into my slow cooker - the only note to self was to add less liquid next time but the slow cooking certainly brought out all the flavours and the vegetables held their shape, were soft and tender but not mushy. Once the rice is cooked and drained and transferred to an ovenproof dish and the self draining steamer baskets of vegetables removed, I reuse the same stockpot to cook the curry. This is probably 2-3 tsps maybe more but I like to say dollop - doesn't everyone know what a dollop is? Then the essential ingredient - or red if you are going to be using beef. It says 'moderate heat' on the jar - my several dollops had the children reaching for their water but one good dollop seems to make a mild but satisfying dish. Once the onion is golden I add in the rest of the ingredients - the pumpkin, - 1 cube dissolved in 500ml boiling water - as the curry simmers away I have more stock prepared ready to add in should I need to. The magic ingredient which imparts that coolness to counteract the heat of the curry is mint, freshly picked from the garden and finely shredded with another utensil I wish I had discovered years ago - the mezzaluna. I'm about to have a lunch time serving now - I always make more than enough to have leftovers for lunch. She has been frequenting Southern USA cooking sites and having tasted this pie - well I'm heading into my garden and willing those pumpkins to grow.