thepassionatecook

Bacon-wrapped king prawns on rosemary skewer with lemon-olive oil dip

Super easy idea for a stylish and very tasty appetiser... it doesn't get better than this!
It's so simple, it doesn't really require a recipe as such... the success lies in choosing top quality ingredients. We're lucky here in Singapore, because seafood is easy to come by and especially the shellfish is incredibly fresh and tasty. Try to find a good fishmonger in your area and insist on buying king prawns that have never been frozen. You will be rewarded with prawns that are juicy and succulent and very, very tender.

Next, choose your bacon. This really only works with thinly cut (or, as they like to say here, "shaved"). I have always been an advocate of thinly cut cold meats - I will often be overheard at the deli counter saying that I "want to be able to read my newspaper through it" ;-)
The kind of bacon you want is a raw/dry-cured bacon from the belly which is generously seasoned (here in Singapore I get this at the Swiss butchers in Dempsey, in London I would buy Pancetta from Waitrose or Sainsbury's) - you want a nicely cured piece of raw bacon - don't even think about buying your average breakfast bacon... the slices are so thick that it become impossible to gauge if the prawns are propery cooked and they ooze too much water as well... I have no idea what they put in that and I don't think I want to find out!

Then you need an excellent-quality extra-virgin/cold pressed olive oil. I personally like French because it has the subtlest tast in my opinion, but I am also partial to some Portuguese. Take your own favourite, as long as you don't use a non-descript supermarket brand you should be fine. Mix with the same amount of lemon juice and shake well in an old jam jar to prepare the dip.

Prawncakes on lemongrass skewers

These skewers full of wonderfully exotic flavours are a wonderful addition to any party spread... or an excellent entree at your next BBQ! They're a far cry from the ones served as pub grub, full of grease and served with the ubiquitous store-bought sweet chilli sauce. These here are fresh and healthy as they are grilled rather than deep-fried. Quickly put together, they benefit from a few hours in the fridge for the flavours to mingle - so you have time to get on with other stuff.

The picture above was taken at a catering I did a while ago - limited in space, I had to use my Foreman Grill, but they are even better grilled on a charcoal BBQ and eaten straight off it. Serve them with a dipping sauce consisting of brown sugar, soy sauce and lime juice, add chopped garlic, chilli and coriander to your liking.

Similar types of prawn cakes are available throughout Asia - on a recent trip to Vietnam, we saw them on almost every streetcorner. They call them Chao Tom there and they're actually moulded, lollipop style, onto pieces of sugar cane. While this is available at most supermarkets here, I realise that it is more difficult to get your hands on it elsewhere, which is why this version using lemongrass is a great alternative - the fringe benefit being the wonderful flavour it imparts!

Sesame prawns with sour mango & cucumber salad

So I might struggle to find some ingredients here, but prawns are something Singapore definitely has no shortage of and the quality is absolutely amazing! There are many seafood restaurants in town and for someone coming from a country/continent where seafood is rarely available fresh (meaning that it hasn't been frozen or transported on ice somewhere along the supply chain), this country certainly is prawn heaven. No matter where you go, you can be sure to be served the plumpest and juiciest prawns - fingerlickingly good.

Our first experience of eating prawns here was on Boat Quay - now, to even the most seasoned, but still undiscerning tourist, this might look like the tourist trap par excellence... in the middle of the Financial District and close to all the sights, a row of restaurants lined up along the river, right where the cruises depart. If it wasn't for two little boys (and the two adults lugging them around and cheering them on "come on, it's only 35C in the shade!") who happened to be utterly exhausted after what really was just a short walk, it wouldn't even have crossed our minds to enter one of the eateries there on the river. Where we come from, big, fat panels of glossy photos of, well, food (but not the kind of foodporn you find on blogs these days, just poorly photographed dishes of unidentifiable food objects) don't really scream "die, die, must try" or even "decent food at reasonable prices" at you... they holler "get out of here as fast as you can, this is a complete rip-off and you'll probably be hugging the toilet for days".

Not so here. After passing by the 15th restaurant and its seafront garden and fending off many a smooth-talking waiter, I let myself finally be lured into one of them (it was the "fish and chips available" that did it, you might remember that the day before, my son had said that he hated Chinese food and that was that) - and Chris and I had the most wonderful selection of top-quality prawns we had had in a very long time. The sheer variety on offer will bowl you over, but I will have to delve into the weird (cereal prawns, anyone?) and wonderful (drunken prawns, yessir!) ways of enjoying your crustaceans on another occasion.

Now that I call a (fantabulous!) kitchen my own and have a great wet market just around the corner, I obviously want to get my hand dirty and cook again... Vietnamese being one of my favourite cuisines on this continent, I finally embarked on getting my money's worth out of Lemongrass and Lime, a cookbook I bought ages ago - I had simply been struggling to find the ingredients. And what in London would have involved a car journey to the Asian supermarket and my tried and trusted fish monger, both in different parts of town, is now available right on my doorstep... you can see why I am loving it here, right?

These prawns are deep-fried just for a minute in order to retain all their succulent juices, the crispy coating of a light batter providing a lovely contrast of textures. I love the salad they come with it, its flavours being like a summation of what Vietnamese cooking is about: fresh, crunchy ingredients bursting with flavour - sweet, sour, salty all happening in one bite in perfect unison. It actually uses the same sauce you will serve for dipping, the ubiquitous Nuoc Cham. I have made a mental note to include coriander and mint leaves when I make it again, just because I am addicted to these herbs and they feature widely in Vietnamese cooking, so I think the food police has nothing on me.

Way better than cereal prawns, but that's just my personal opinion!!!

Seared scallops on samphire

Ah! Samphire! Always such a treat, but so hard to track down. When you do get your hands on some, you get an extra reward by a fishmonger whose smile says "that's a girl who knows her seafood". I know he loves me for always asking for the more unusual stuff, the things that are just that bit harder to track down, and he, like me, enjoys the resulting satisfaction. I like that. A lot. So that's my Ode to the Polish (I think) chubby guy at Fishworks in Richmond... I don't even know his name. Shame on me, but that's easily remedied.

Moving on. I was desperate to find some samphire as soon as the season opened, really, slightly egged on by wanting to re-create (and much improve on) a dish one of my fellow diners recently had at the Cadogan Arms in Chelsea. The idea of scallops, samphire and butter is one that's hard to beat and I like butter as much as the next person (in fact, I am positive I like it a LOT MORE than the next person), but the specimens served at said pub were swimming in obscene amounts of butter, and it wasn't of top quality either.

So I took the opportunity to create a much lighter version at home for an eclectic tapas feast we had with some friends just before our holiday to Spain... Wiebke and Dirk, if you're reading this, it always happens to us, we seem to meet the loveliest people just before relocating somewhere else - we've been living at spitting distance for the past few years, why did it take us so long to find out that we get on like a house on fire???

Anyway, everybody fell in love with this dish - and it couldn't be simpler if you tried. So next time you go to your fishmongers', see if they have some scallops and ask for a handful of samphire as well - it's an excellent source of vitamin C and minerals and, being a diuretic and digestive aid, is currently being investigated as a possibly treatment option for obesity and thought to be beneficial for kidney complaints. Here are some tips on picking your own.

The scallops are easily cleaned and all they need is flash-frying in a pan of melted butter, tossing the blanched samphire in the cooking juices and serving the lot in the shells or on some toasted sourdough - give it a dusting of freshly grated nutmeg, if you want, which is my little secret twist... a very easy, impressive and extremely satifying starter!

Seared scallops with lime & miso dressing on avocado purée

Simple pleasures are always the most satisfying in my opinion, they might not always win beauty contests or prizes for culinary innovation, but when the taste:effort ratio is as compelling as with this dish, I am most happy. I loved the creaminess of the avocado as a perfect complement to the buttery scallops - and the Asian-style dressing is a refreshing twist I should use more often... this is easily whipped together, so perfect for a weekday supper or a starter for a dinner party.

We enjoyed this with sourdough baguette, but I was really craving another accompaniment which would have been perfect: I had it a little while ago at Zuma, where they serve an absolutely amazing tuna & salmon tartare with lotus chips and that addictive sheet of a prawn cracker with seaweed... I am still salivating at the thought of it!

Smoked haddock, spinach, asapargus lasagne with poached egg

Reading the title of this post, you might think I've gone a bit coocoo - lasagne? fish? egg??? - but this is not a lasagne in its true sense. It is a much lighter version, more subtle in taste, little hassle to assemble and the poached egg, well, that's a little extra treat for the more adventurous eaters among you. Feel free to leave the egg out if the idea of an open lasagne and especially one using fish is already pushing the boat out into uncomfortably deep culinary waters so to speak.

I made a similar lasagne, based on a recipe by Gordon Ramsay, five years ago already and the very fact that it's stuck with me for all this time should tell you that there's something undoubtedly attractive and almost addictive about this combination of flavours. The only downside is the assembly - unless you have warming lamps or are lucky enough to live in a hot climate, the chances are that you won't serve this dish piping hot... make sure you warm the plates first to conserve as much heat as possible and just learn to live with the fact that lukewarm is the new hot. It's much healthier for you that way, anyway ;-)

This is the recipe for you if you want something unusual, creamy and scrumptious... you can prepare most ingredients ahead, then reheat at the time of assembly - the only thing that needs attention on the spot is the poached egg. I have made a vow to adapt this recipe even further by assembling and baking in the oven shortly before serving - but the opportunity hasn't presented itself yet! So there you have it, that's my resolution for 2010!

Asian crab salad croustades

The festive season is near, I am doing everything I can to get into the Christmas spirit, which I always find hard... it's the climate, I do need my snow to get into the mood! But it is snowing as we speak, so I can't complain, although it wouldn't be the first time that we have snow just before and then run out in T-shirts on the actual day!

I have much to look forward to over the next three weeks, my parents will be joining us for the celebrations after a month in Australia, my husband will be off until January - a luxury I haven't had for a long, long time! And so after baking several batches of cookies, some old and trusted, some new and instantly liked, I now need to sit down and plan the food...

There will always be an opportunity for fingerfood, so we'll have rather a lot of that... this recipe here is one that I concocted for a catering I did last week - an all girls' Christmas party, all girls' with astonishing waistlines, I have to say, and much of what I made was on the healthy and figure-conscious side. So if you want to indulge without piling on the pounds, here's a small step towards that.

Since white crab meat is quite expensive, I would suggest you buy a whole crab at your fishmongers and have them pit it for you (white and brown meat separately), it works out about half the price! I paid £12 at a rather pricey fishmonger whereas the crab meat alone would have cost me £30 - and that was for almost 50 canapes! I didn't want to throw out the brown meat, so made a little mayo with it for the base... adding some creaminess and a depth of flavour you won't get from the white. You could use just the salad and arrange on a leaf of gem lettuce for an easy and stylish starter.

These croustades are incredibly simple to make and bursting with flavour - the salad can be prepared well in advance and is relatively easy to assemble as well... just what you need when you've got a million things on your mind.

Roast skate wing on beluga lentils with chorizo, green beans and potatoes

I recently reconnected with an old friend I have not seen in almost twenty years (oh, the wonderful world of facebook) and as a busy working Mum, she asked for recipes that she can "prepare in about half an hour using just one pan". That's exactly the kind of cooking I am forced to do most of the time now, being a full-time student and mother of three... but being pressed for time also means that I can't stop to photograph, so there aren't many recipes I publish. I have trawled through the list of dishes made over the years and found quite a few that fit the bill in at least one of the two categories and I will label them accordingly very soon - look out for a drop-down box on the sidebar entitled "quick fixes" or something along those lines!

This is a wonderfully rustic dish - this is only the second time I ever made skate and I don't know why I don't cook it more... it's one of those fish that are no hassle whatsoever to prepare, nor is it fiddly to eat. You simply roast it in the oven, then literally scrape the meat off the rather peculiar-looking, long and thick bones - no choking on little bones, you're left with just a pile of juicy meat that goes brilliantly with the farm-house style lentils and beans. 

Of course, this dish doesn't fit either of the above categories, but it's still worth mentioning - it uses a frying pan and a casserole and it will take about 45 minutes, 30 of which you're free to do whatever you have to: bathe the kids and get them ready for bed, clean out the hen house or just put your feet up with a glass of wine in hand... of course, I couldn't do either of those (I don't have a hen house, for starters), as I had to write down the recipe and get everything set up to take a picture, oh well (I made up for it after ;-))

Quinoa, prawn & asparagus salad with coriander & lime dressing

Super tasty meets super healthy. Not something you read every day, right? This salad has become an absolute favourite in our household - it is inspired by an old clipping out of a magazine supplement, but just as happens with dishes you make over and over again (we have this almost every week), it has been adapted, improved and reached a point where you just sleep-walk your way through the recipe, using some main components but also throwing in whatever you might have left in the fridge.

I normally add some avocado, but as per usual all I could get at the supermarket that day was either so hard you could easily kill someone with it or completely mushy - so I threw in some green asparagus which we're also eating like mad at the moment. I vary the herbs a lot, using dill or basil, always coriander, though, simply because I am addicted to it. The prawns and quinoa are a constant, but it would taste equally nice with some pan-fried or even smoked salmon.

Quinoa is a relatively recent discovery of mine, I had tried it on various occasions and always completely overcooked it. Ever since I discovered I could steam it in my Thermomix, which takes all of 20 minutes and doesn't need any attention at all, I make quinoa at least twice a week - a big batch of it, too, so that I can throw some into a tasty salad, add some to a, say, tomato soup and feed the kids with it as well. Perfectly versatile and super healthy: as well as being a comforting carb, it is one of the few non-meat products that contain all your essential amino acids. Plus it contains more protein than beef, balancing out your naughty carb fix niftily!

Monkfish fillets on butternut squash with herbed walnuts

This is one of those episodes where I was completely doubting what I was doing in the kitchen and therefore didn't even bother making notes other than scribbling onto the magazine in front of me... I almost didn't take a picture either which would have been a massive mistake because you really ought to know about this dish. Has this ever happened to you? You see a picture in a food magazine or cookbook, like the looks of it, don't have the time to read the recipe or really think about it and then as you cook and get more intimate with the ingredients (ones you are not very familiar with or that you have not yet used in combination), suddenly you're almost stricken with fear... fear of the dish ending in an absolute disaster, being inedible, a horrible, tasteless slush of things that wouldn't want to be eaten together if you paid them a million dollars... and yet you had all intentions of making an effort and having a nice special meal with a really special someone only to end it all in tears. And then you take your first bite and you shake your head in disbelief, thinking how lucky you are that you averted a culinary disaster. And with every bite you fall in love with it more. And by the end of it you think it's the best thing since sliced bread. (I am not talking about Hovis with margarine, but a slice of freshly baked, crusty sourdough with a generous smear of butter studded with crunchy fleur de sel. And maybe a scattering of wild garlic or chopped chives). Been there? Done that?

Well, I had such a moment last week. My Mum had brought the last edition of an Austrian food magazine (that changes its name so often I can't be bothered to keep up-to-date with the re-echristenings anymore... at this moment in time, it's called "Wienerin. Food & Style", December 2008. It has to be said that despite all their relaunches they have kept one constant: their food stylist Gabriele Halper and photographer Luzia Ellert who is an absolute genius in my opinion) and I have mentioned before how you'd get one edition of this quarterly and you cook it back to front, then in the next edition, you'd be hard-pressed to find a single recipe that tickles your taste buds. This edition is love at second sight, my Mum almost didn't bring it because she saw nothing in it, I had to leaf through it twice, but did find quite a selection of dishes in the end that I'd like to try (or bastardise, as the case may be).

The recipe I based this present dish on was by a certain Joerg Domansky who rose to fame at one of Vienna's elite Italians, Cantinetta Antinori. He now cooks at Procacci, a restaurant I hadn't heard of until recently but am very tempted to visit next time I am in Vienna. It combines monkfish fillets slowly poached in olive oil with a creamy squash purée, a combination that my kitchen hasn't seen before, but the stroke of genius comes with the topping: chopped pecans (walnuts in the original), simply dressed with some lemon juice and parsley. I don't quite know how, but this combination of buttery purée with the zingy crunch of the nuts absolutely hit my spot. I hope it touches you in the same way.

And here's a little reminder to kindly join us for the latest edition of "Waiter, there's something in my..." where the theme is "Hot puds". The deadline is the end of this month, there's a phantastic prize to be won and all the details surrounding participation can be found here.