No. 6: Don't come the raw prawn...

To celebrate (!) the end of our brief summer hols and our imminent return to work, I invited Kim and Brian over for dinner. Naturellement, another Heart Foundation BBQ experience was in the offing.

Kim had spent the day on Bridge Rd, shopping for a new summer wardrobe, and wore one of her fabulous new items to dinner - see pic. She will be happy to receive any compliments readers of the blog may wish to offer her.

Given how much eating we'd all been doing over the festive season, I decided another seafood and salad meal would be appropriate. The dishes du jour were quick thai prawn salad (page 29), tomato and onion salad with mint and chives (page 30), and rice and green chilli pilaf (page 36).

I have a confession to make: I didn't even actually use a barbie, not even my electric grill plate quasi-barbie, for this meal. The only thing that needed cooking other than the rice, was the prawns, and for ease of preparation I'd bought raw prawns already shelled and deveined (rather than barbequeuing prawns in their shell and then preparing them). I marinated them in a tiny bit of olive oil and a little garlic and chilli, then stir fried them in a big non-stick frypan. Whilst not totally faithful to the methode du recipe, I think this does prove that even non-barbequers will find something they enjoy cooking out of the book. The prawns were then mixed with a cucumber salad, quite similar to the one featured in Blog No. 5, but this time with a much spicier sauce. I also used heaps of chopped herbs (much more than quarter of a cup) and a crushed peanut garnish for the salad, and served it with extra lime segments, in addition to the lime in the dressing.

It was quite delicious. Kim said, "the smell of lime is great - it's really summery". Brian's contribution was, "these herbs are deeply, deeply, sensuous". I was relieved that he'd chosen to channel Nigella rather than Gordon Ramsay.

The tomato salad and the pilaf were good accompaniments - it all added up to a tasty, fresh meal which everyone enjoyed. A couple of Kim's food art pics are pasted below. I suspect she could be looking for a new career in food photography, so feel free to contact me with any offers.

Just one final note - the prawn salad was meant to be served with 3 cups of mizuna leaves. Neither I nor my very good local greengrocer had any idea what these were. I ended up using some other salad leaves ("lamb's breath"), which were very nice, but I feel like we may have missed out on a critical element that would have added that little something extra special to the meal. Dagnam it...