Yellow lemon, coconut and ginger broth

And two ways to use it

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This could be the most yellow recipe I’ve ever made. Lemon and turmeric dye coconut milk a bright, golden shade of yellow. And with it they bring the taste of that colour - a sunshiney exuberant freshness. Can food taste of optimism? If it can, this broth does.

Some food so clearly tastes of the colour that it is. Basil, parsley and dill all taste so firmly green, verdant. Sweet potato tastes deep bronzed orange. The taste of rhubarb or blood orange, to me, never taste anything but pink. Some food is its colour and this broth is yellow.

This yellow broth is a riff on a recipe from Bee Wilson’s book The Secret of Cooking. Bee’s book is full of the very best kind of make-ahead cooking. Easy curry sauces and pizza bases that you will thank yourself for later. I’ve cooked a lot from it. The bit I’ve borrowed from Bee is using lots of lemon zest instead of lemongrass.

As someone who’s special interest/Mastermind subject would be ‘ways to use a lemon’, not long after reading the recipe I was peeling long lemon strips into a pan of coconut milk.

This recipe leans on Bee’s laksa sauce in that, like Bee’s, it makes rich and concentrated broth that’s enough for 2 dinners for 4 people. The intention is that you freeze half for another day. Making the broth is super easy though so don’t be put off by the fact there are two ‘recipes’, it’s really a case of putting things in a pan.

I make a very easy paste in a blender with the lemon, garlic, turmeric, chilli and, crucially, some sugar. This gets cooked out, then topped up with coconut milk before miso is stirred in to round it out. A process so simple for the unreasonable amount of flavour in the finished broth.

I have not used the name laksa here as what I make is so many steps from a traditional laksa that it ceases to be one, but it is inspired by the feeling of a laksa - highly-scented coconut broth that sits around noodles or rice and vegetables.

From there this is a really 'choose your own adventure’ style recipe. You could have it simply as a spoonable broth, with chickpeas and spinach or with rice or noodles. I’ve given you two ideas of how I like to use it - one for rice and one for rice noodles.

The first, a bowl of greens and noodles that need nothing more than warming in the broth for 5 minutes - making this an almost instant dinner if you already have sauce in the fridge. Any greens would work in the same way here.

The second, a rice bowl has some roasted squash, but if turning on the oven feels like too much then peeled and very thinly sliced pieces of squash (or sweet potato) could be cooked in the broth for 10 minutes and you’d have the same kind of feeling without turning the oven on. What I would not skip here is the shallot pickle. It's the easiest thing - shallots and chilli scrunched with some citrus - lemon here but lime works too, and a little sugar to pickle them. The pickle keeps in the fridge for weeks and perks up any curry, soup, or rice bowl. I would say these pickled shallots are my most used add on to meals this winter. If you take nothing else from this recipe let it be this very simple, very useful pickle.

Lemon, coconut and ginger broth base