Dinner tonight was on me at my Mum’s.
I wanted to push the boat out and try to create a Laksa in Thanet – and that proved to be very tough. I could not get half the ingredients so had to rely on a Tesco Laksa Paste in a jar (oh no) as a base and try to ‘jazz it up’ a little to make it more authentic. When I opened the jar it smelt like a sort of jam, like no Laksa ever to cross these nostrils – what to do, let’s go shopping and see what we can do.
Rushing ahead it actually turned out really nice, amazing what you can achieve with a rather less than average supermarket curry paste.
Here we go – enough here for 4-5:
- 3 chicken breasts, sliced thinly
- 14 peeled tiger prawns
- 1 cup of shelled and cleaned cockles – I used cockles from Margate, nice and local and nice and fresh
- 3 chicken stock cubes dissolved in approximately 1 litre of boiling water
- 3 stalks of lemon grass finely chopped
- 2 red onions roughly chopped
- 1 cup of salted peanuts roughly chopped
- 1 cup of coriander roughly ripped
- 1 tin of coconut milk
- 1 jar of Laksa paste – mine came from Tesco
- 1 tablespoon chopped garlic
- 1 tablespoon chopped ginger
- 5 Spring onions – just the green bits finely sliced for garnish
- 1 more cup of ripped coriander for garnish
- 3 packets of egg noodles
In a large wok swill some oil and get it on the heat, throw in the Laksa paste and fry this off until you really smell the spices.
Add in the garlic, ginger, onions and lemon grass and continue to stir fry for another 5 or so minutes, then pour in the chicken stock and coconut milk. Stir this though continually to really mix the flavours together.
Add in the chicken and fry off until this is cooked all the way through. Immediately add in the prawns and the cockles until the prawns have turned pink. Whack in the noodles, breaking them up so there are no clumps. Throw in one cup of coriander and turn off the heat. The heat of the gravy will wilt the coriander.
Serve this in a bowl and sprinkle with a little of the remaining coriander, the chopped peanuts and some of the green Spring onion tops.
Get this out to eat immediately. As I said it came out really nice. Not as authentic I would have liked, but it was damn good.
So there you go Fanet – you can now eat authentic-ish Singaporean Laksa, Kennett style.
Enjoy!!!
