Cooking confessions

*  As it happens, I have never had cause to make up my own dry curry mix before.  Well, I have made dishes that used a mix of these curry base spices, but I don't know that they were called curries, and I never had reason before to look up a simple, base curry mix of spices.   (This makes me feel inadequate as a cook.)

Anyway, I was making a prawn curry (from a Filipino food website) and it just called for "curry powder", but I had only one that said it was a meat curry powder.   I decided to make up from scratch instead, and used this mix from this website, and the quantity was just right for the 4 person meal:

Ingredients

• 1 Tbsp ground coriander seeds
• 1 ½ tsp cumin
• 1 tsp turmeric
• ½ tsp ground black pepper
• ½ tsp chili powder
• ½ tsp ground ginger

As the website explains, you can add a wide variety of extra spices, and apparently Indian families have their favourite combinations they like.   I am still surprised I never did this before.

*  The prawn curry I had made once before, apparently on 7 June 2015.   Given that I posted about how it was nice, I'm surprised it took me this long to go back to it.   But looking at my old post, it seems I made a strange mistake:  I said that a "14 oz" can of coconut milk was about half a "normal" can.  But it isn't - 14 fluid oz is 414 ml, which is a "standard" sized can here for vegetables, soup etc.   So it would appear that the first time I made it, I may have used half of the coconut milk.  I didn't this time, and maybe that is why I found it particularly good yesterday.

The original recipe is kind of vague as to how much prawn head "stock" to use.   Yesterday, I boiled up the prawn heads (25 or so) in about 2 - 3 cups of water, but let it boil down until there was about one cup left.   This was added to the two, 400 ml, cans of coconut milk, and it made a lot of sauce.  Enough for 6 meals, I reckon, if I had more prawns to hand.   

I think the key thing in it is seasoning at the end with fish sauce.  Anyway, apart from the painful time of shelling and cleaning 26 raw prawns, this is pretty easy dish that is good to eat.  

*  Tonight, I made another thing for the first time:  a pea puree.   (To go with confit duck leg - bought pre-made by Luv-a-Duck).  I thought it pleasant, but there are million versions of it and perhaps it needed some thing extra - cream or lemon perhaps?   I didn't use mint - I didn't have any and am not sure it is a good match for duck.   All I did was boil 2 cups of frozen peas, fry off in butter a smallish onion, and blitz all of it with two or three teaspoons of parmesan cheese and a bit of the pea cooking water.   Maybe more cheese would have been better?   It looks great on the plate, at least.