Prawn Again

The weekend had arrived, I had worked hard and pushed through challenges during the week and even though it was a four day week it had been a very busy one but the weekend was here and with it plenty of downtime and a new cooking project or two to, literally, get my teeth into.

Having recently visited the excellent and local Kathmandu Gurkha Restaurant, a restaurant that has the happy ability to make excellent quality curry without it being too rich, I was inspired to make a curry with plenty of prawns. Seafood, with the exception of squid, octopus and other similar sushi type food, is one of my favourite types of food. I also like spicy food so this dish was the opportunity to cook something with the best of both these worlds.

The ingredients for this one so you can give it a go too are as follows:

2 Garlic Cloves.
1 Red Onion.
1 Pepper.
1 Medium-Sized Chilli Pepper.
2 Teaspoons of Turmeric.
2 Teaspoons of Garam Masala.
2 Teaspoons of Coriander.
1 tablespoon of Tomato Puree.
10 ounces of pre-cooked prawns.
A tin of Coconut Milk.
8 ounces of long grain rice, or a rice of your choice.

After slicing the Garlic, Red Onion and Pepper up very finely I added them to my Le Cresceut dish with plenty of sunflower oil so that when I cooked them on the hob they did not stick to the bottom of the dish. I then added the spices and the Tomato Puree. I'm a great believer with curries that to get the best taste you must add the spices to the dish early on.

I left the food to sweat on the hob on a medium heat with the Le Creseut lid on for about twenty-five minutes on a medium light while turning them periodically as they cooked.

Tonight, as the sun was shining and I could see the sunny fields and hills from my conservatory, it seemed only appropriate to stick some country music on the player. I went for Area Code 615's eponymous debut, which is an instrumental record mixing bluegrass, country and a hint of hard rock on original tracks like the peerless opener "Southern Comfort" and the epic closer, which is a cover of Bob Dylan's "Just like a Woman".

After twenty-five minutes in went the Prawns to the dish and after another ten minutes the coconut milk. I turned up the heat on the hob and stirred hard repeatedly to make the coconut milk mix in with the other ingredients and make sure that by the end of the cooking, which was after a further fifteen minutes of stirring, the curry was thick and not too runny.

While I had been stirring the curry together I had also boiled up some Long Grain Rice which I now served up with the curry. The taste of the curry was not dissimilar to that when I've had curries at restaurants and the plan to put the spices in from the get-go as well as boil some of the coconut milk away and stir the rest in towards the end of preparation was the secret to making this end-of-week dish a success.

Brightness of the day- the Turmeric made this dish shine almost as brightly as the late summer sun.