Prawns, at last

 

Now that I’m at home daily awaiting for the arrival of little Jamie, there is a need to whip up my own lunch food (so as to avoid having to go out just to buy some).

Just last week, I finally got to make something scrumptious that I was extremely satisfied to eat: A dish containing prawns.

Prawns! I haven’t had much of that since getting married. The reason being that Deric cannot take things like seafood because it has a high uric acid level. This is in addition to his inability to take too much carbs in his daily diet.

I’ve been doing my best to keep within the confines of a domestic diet that meets his needs, but I cannot deny the fact that there are certain foods that I miss.

The cookbooks that we often refer to have quite a few of seafood dishes in them, often involving prawns, and I have always wanted to try them out.

So, finally, since I would only be cooking for one (ie ME), I got the long awaited chance to try out a prawn dish. Yay 😀

This one came from a cookbook called Easy Chinese Stir-Fries by Helen Chen (ISBN: 978-0-470-38756-6) which Deric bought at a discount during one of the bazaar sales held at his office (if I didn’t remember it wrongly). We’ve been using the book pretty often even from the early days of our marriage (which is coming to 3 years now, so fast!) and it has never failed to impress us with the outcome of the dishes.

The author learned her culinary skills from her mother who pioneered Asian restaurants in America, apparently. For people who are based out of China/Asia, it’s pretty cool that the dishes resemble the ones we have here in Malaysia quite accurately.

So anyway, the dish that I tried was called Yangzhou Slippery Shrimp (prawn, shrimp, sama lah :P) and it was really simple to follow. I already had all the ingredients in my kitchen, plus Deric and I had bought a bag of frozen, shelled prawns at Jaya Grocer some time back which weighed 200g and was just the right amount for my consumption.

Original recipe called for 1 pound (approximately 453g) of prawns, but I found that the recipe was still alright if I still followed the measurements for the other ingredients at their prescribed quantities.

The resulting prawn dish is as what you see in the above picture. It was really tasty: A little sourish and sweet, but not too much, and garlicky too.

I also cooked some baby spinach to eat together with rice and the prawns. For that dish, I used garlic, oil and half a cube of Knorr’s chicken stock, coupled with my own veggie stock that had been frozen into cubes and stored in the fridge. The flavour from the homemade veggie stock was really obvious, even more distinct than what the commercial chicken stock usually provided.

I think I just might make more homemade stock in the future. Seems to be worth the effort as it is able to produce better flavours.

It’s really great to be at home and to have more time to chill right now. I look forward to other culinary exploits in the kitchen soon. As soon as I clear my remaining stories for work though. I want to get them out of the way ASAP so I can be worry-free when it’s Jamie’s time to come out.

There’s plenty of other things I hope to accomplish around the home besides cooking too, and I hope to share that with you once I get round to them.

It’s such an exciting time. I really like where I’m at in life right now. 🙂