goa coconut and green chilli prawns

This is my third time cooking Indian cuisines from scratch. By from scratch I mean I didn't use any ready made sauce or pre-mixed spices such as curry power. I used as much whole spices as possible as opposed to the powder form.


Today I set out to made an Indian seafood dish. I settled on the Coconut and green chilli prawns from Madhur Jaffrey's "Flavors of India". You can pick up this book at Amazon for about $10 used plus shipping. I pick this dish based on the spices and ingredients and in this the used of tamarind is what attracted me. It is a dish from the Gao - a small coastal state in the West coast of country. I have quite a bit of frozen wild prawns in my freezer so this dish it is.

a breakfast with homemade boudin and leftover collard green i made yesterday - cajun and indian go well together

 no shopping trip required - i have everything from my pantry, refrigerator and freezer

here are most of the ingredients - i advise against buying anything ethnic from Trader Joe's; the can of coconut milk is watered down and mixed with god knows what (i can taste it)

Having cooked through 4 Indian dishes now it, I can see the pattern of the foundations and techniques. From looking at the ingredient list, I can almost guess the process. Seeing the color of the sauce turned out quite pale, I doubled the turmeric and added a bit of paprika.

I served it with the yellow rice and collard green I made yesterday. The prawn dish turned out to be sweeter than I anticipated. I thought may be the Thai tamarind paste has added sugar. I check the label on the container and there is no added sugar. I gave the paste a taste and sure enough it does not taste unnaturally sweet. I concluded that the sweetness simply comes from the medium size yellow onion. All good.

While I prefer the prawn dish to be not so sweet it turned out very good. To my surprised it does not taste all that different if I didn't use individual spices but just use a good quality curry power instead. In Indian cooking, there is no such thing as curry. Curry powder is a convenience for its cuisines outside the country - a bit of lost in translation.

i used a Thai stainless steel serving bowl that i brought back from Bangkok to serve the prawn dish

this is the collard green

this is the yellow rice