Pan fried garlic prawns

Emily has just been to a newly opened tapas place in Glasgow the other night and mentioned about the king prawn dish she had. I have then remembered about the king prawn dish I made this summer which turned out very well.

Many many years ago, my husband and I went to Paris. We went to Basilica of Scre-Coeur (the big white church) sitting on the crest of the hill in Montmartre, Paris  to 'command the fine view' of the city of Paris.  (Well, this is an expression you learn from a text book in Japan during English class, ha ha ha...).

To be honest I remembered more about having been hassled by street vendors trying to sell us sunglasses, fake designer watches and bags than commanding fine view of Paris. Anyhow, we then strode through Place du Tertre as many tourists do and I got a portrait of mine sketched by by an art ist there.

My apology, you are wondering where I am going with this... I have totally forgotten about this sketch till this June when my husband took that sketch to a picture frame shop in Milngavie and that's where we found this fishmonger named Fantoosh Fish (3 Station Road, Milngavie, East Dunbartonshire, G62 8PG). It's a great fishmonger - they have everything. They also had lots of langoustines, really beautiful fillets of tuna etc.

We did not plan to buy any fish or seafood that day. We only went to Milngavie to pick up a picture that had just been framed, but having looked at what the fishmonger had in their shop,  I could not resist not to buy anything. So we bought 10 juicy looking large prawns which costed just under £10 without thinking that much far ahead as to how I was going to cook these....

So, I just decided to simply pan fry them and that's what I did.

Here is my fail-proof easy recipe for lazy cook.

You need:

25 g butter
3 garlic cloves chopped
1 red chlli
1/2 tsp sweet paprika
10 large prawns (such as tiger prawns)
Olive oil
1 juic lemon
chopped parsley

In a large frying pan, heat the olive oil and the butter over a medium heat until the butter is foaming. Add the garlic, paprika and chilli to stair through and cook. Add the prawns to cook until they start turning nicely pink and turn them over to cook evenly. Once prawns are ready, which did not take that long, squeeze lemon juice and toss in the parsley, and it's ready!

We had these with some courgettes that came from my mother-in-law Mary's best friend's garden.

I simply chopped them randomly into bite size chunks, quickly pan fried them with olive oil, rock salt and chilli flakes.

We enjoyed these with a lovely and nicely chilled bottle of Gavi, and of course, I also enjoyed sucking those prawns' heads!!

This could be a very nice tapas dish that you can simply cook at home. Next time when you go to a good fishmonger, buy some large prawns and do try this at home.

That's all forks.