Dad's Cuisine

  Spicy prawn stew This spicy prawn stew is filling, as fiery as you like, and couldn't be easier to put together when you're pushed for time. One of my abiding memories from childhood is my parents' dinner parties. It didn't matter who they had invited - family, old friends, new acquaintances or work colleagues - they were always raucous affairs that lasted for hours. Mum generally made curries on these nights for two reasons: first, curries are fantastic dishes for sharing; and second, due to my childhood aversion to anything resembling spice, it meant my parents could enjoy a curry without me flailing around dramatically in reaction to the merest hint of heat (my brother and I would have to come and say hello to all the guests before being packed swiftly off to bed, with strict instructions to stay upstairs).  On those evenings, the dining room would come alive with exotic sights and sounds - oranges, reds and yellows crashing into each other;  the cracks of ...

GARLIC PRAWNS IN COCONUT SAUCE Want to impress your friends and family with a succulent dish? Try this easy-peasy dish of garlic prawns in coconut sauce!  I've had a few people comment recently that I haven't added a recipe for a while (rightly so), but this is mainly because Dad has become such a deft hand in the kitchen in the months since we started this project .  He has become an exceedingly enthusiastic cook, looking up recipes and techniques online and ordering obscure spices and ingredients that come with a minimum eight-week delivery period. He practices his recipes a few times, then tests them on me and my family. The results are always highly satisfactory. Admittedly, he sometimes takes experimentation a little too far, as with this particular recipe, when he added chick peas on the second attempt (insider tip: don't add chick peas to this recipe).  I'm not sure where Dad came across this dish, but the whole family is delighted when ...

PASTA WITH SARDINES, SPINACH AND PINE NUTS A grown-up pasta dish that's perfect for a midweek supper and a great way to sneak some green onto kids' plates! Like most people, I usually have a tin of sardines lurking somewhere in my kitchen, which I always use as a topping for toast when I need to eat and run. Sardines are a great source of protein, those all-important omega-3 fatty acids, and vitamin B12. I've had fresh sardines on the barbecue, but I've never thought of using tinned sardines for cooking.  However, after coming back from holiday following an exhausting ten-hour drive from one end of the country to the other, I stared despondently at the bare cupboards, hoping to be inspired by the few ingredients gracing the shelves.  These included pasta (of course), a single tin of sardines and, bewilderingly, some pine nuts that I didn't remember buying. I also had half a bag of spinach in the freezer, and hey presto, all the makings of a delicious d...

CHUNI LAL'S MALAI CURRY A tasty curry straight from Dad's childhood in India. Now that Dad has stopped relying so much on takeaways, he's been craving a decent homemade curry. Having grown up in Burma and India, he knows a thing or two about how a decent curry should taste.  This dish is one that was prepared by Dad's family's cook, Chuni Lal, when the family was in Delhi. As a child, Dad would sit cross-legged on the kitchen floor with Chuni Lal as he ground spices, chopped onions and garlic and smoked his biri (a foul smelling Indian cigarette, according to Dad).  This is a Malai recipe – Malai was the cooking style of the cooks of the Mughal emperors . The Mughals conquered the entire Indian subcontinent, but hated the spicy, fiery curries of their subjects. Malai cooking was created to make curries which were easier on the palate. We are exceedingly proud of Dad, who made this curry from scratch, using a recipe he found on a scrap of paper in his M...