A good dish can catch you unaware.
There was a suggestion we should have a prawn curry this evening. Rather than picking up a book on Indian cooking I decided to have a flick through my book on Persian food. Somewhere in the back of my mind I must have half remembered a conversation in the veg shop about Iranian seafood and how it takes on some of the curry flavours of the East.
And so I found a recipe for prawn stew.
The prawns were frozen and allowed to defrost over the afternoon. The most testing ingredient for the stew was tamarind paste but I was able to pick up a block in The International Store.
The cooking of it took little more than half an hour.
An onion was chopped and fried in oil until it took on some colour. A couple of chopped cloves of garlic were stirred in. As they cooked I chopped some parsley and coriander. I didn’t have have any fresh fenugreek so I found the packet of dried that lurks in the back of the cupboard.
Some ground nutmeg and a teaspoon of curry powder was stirred into the onions quickly followed by the parsley and coriander. At this point the recipe said tomato paste but we didn’t have any so I chopped up same tomatoes instead.They went into the pan just as it was starting to stick.
In the meantime I had started the cooking process off by soaking half of the chunk of tamarind paste I had bought in boiling water. By now the water was brown and murky and I tipped it into everything else and turned the heat down and gave it a few minutes to cook.
As we were ready to eat prawns were fried in very hot oil and tipped into the the sauce.
We ate it with rice and although it was not strictly a curry it went down well.
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