King Prawns in Coconut Curry Sauce

Recipe Rating: **** 4 star

I cooked this one as a weekday evening meal, although it did take a fair bit of work to do.  The reason I chose to cook this one was because I had some prawns that needed eating up and everything else was pretty much store-cupboard ingredients.  The recipe is from a book I have called Curry which is really good (see Curry Cookbook).

So the ingredients I used were:

200 g king prawns
100 ml thick coconut milk
1 cm piece of fresh root ginger
2 cloves of garlic
2 onions
2 tbsp vegetable oil
1 tsp ground turmeric
1 bay leaf
2 tsp ground cumin
1 green chilli
2 green cardamom pods, seeds ground with a mortar
1/2 tbsp butter
4 small new potatoes [- not in the recipe but I added them to bulk it out]
160 g basmati rice

The cooking went pretty well, it took me a while - you'll notice the audio lasts 45 minutes - but that's how long it took for the entire process, peeling onions right through to food on the table.  The food was almost a little too tasty - I had a couple of mouthfuls of chilli which completely zonked my taste buds!  So I avoided the chilli when eating the dish, but by the end I decided it was a bit bland without the chilli.

The addition of the potatoes did the job for the evening meal, it made it more filling and meant I didn't need as many prawns.  But it was a little dry so I might try without the potato next time.  Definitely cook this another time though and I'll try to do it properly.

Here's the audio:

Meringues!

Recipe Rating: ***** 5 star

So at the weekend I decided that I would try to make meringues.  I had some strawberries and some cream so I thought it would be quite a fun thing to do for Wimbledon.  I had never made meringues before (I have no idea why not, just never happened).  So I found a recipe on the BBC food website which looked pretty good (Meringues).

I decided to use half quantities, these are the ingredients I used:

2 large egg whites
60 g caster sugar
60 g icing sugar

To make the meringues I needed baking paper/parchment, an electric whisk (although you could do it by hand if you have strong wrists), a baking tray, a mixing bowl and an oven.

The meringues when they were done were only just brown on the outside, they were gooey in the middle and were really tasty.  They went really well with the strawberries and cream, and they were pretty easy to make.  I definitely recommend this one!

Attached is the link to the audio - let me know what you think.

Ever covered your ipad in flour...?

Hello to all fellow cooks!
    or food lovers who fear cooking...
    or proper chefs who cringe in horror at my cooking methods....
    or food haters who have yet to be converted! 

Welcome to my little experiment - please feed back and tell me how it is going, because I have absolutely no idea.  And it would be great to hear from you.  So here's my hypothesis...

I like to cook from recipe books - they're great for new ideas.  Unfortunately I get a lot of my recipes off the internet, not all, but quite a few, and my computer doesn't really feel at home in the kitchen.  It complains when it gets covered in flour, or grease, or sugar...  So I wanted to test the hypothesis that a 'talking recipe' played in real-time whilst cooking might be an alternative medium for the modern cook.

On this blog, each time I try a new recipe I will upload an audio commentary and I will do my best to describe what I'm doing sufficiently well for you to follow it, I'll also include the recipe details in the blog for you to refer to.  Through this process I hope that it will be possible for people to create the food without needing to press a laptop button or turn the page of a recipe book, or an e-reader!  I will also review the recipes and tell you what I think of them and hopefully you'll be able to get an idea of how easy they are to do from the length of the audio file.

So that's my plan - if you try any of the recipe's please let me know how you get on.  And if you have any advice as to how I can make it easier to follow just say.

Thanks!  Enjoy the cooking :)