I love Thai food, especially the sort you get served on a hot beach near Phuket with a foot massage for dessert. However, you can’t have it all, and this is a really easy recipe to re-create some of those flavours, if not the glorious delight of toe rubbing. I always keep a large bag of shelled, uncooked prawns in the freezer (Costco does a fantastic deal), because they come in so handy for a dish like this that as virtually all the other ingredients may come from your store cupboard.
So you will need, l piece of lemon grass, peeled and chopped, fresh is best but the bottled stuff is fine 450g/1lb of defrosted or fresh raw prawns that have been de-veined, that means removing that funny black line, which is in fact its digestive tract, and believe me you don’t want to eat what that prawn has been eating! 2 tablespoons of green curry paste, we are really lucky as there is a brilliant Thai food store in Maidenhead, just next to the market where you can buy fresh 
ingredients and great curry pastes. My favourite is Mae Ploy, they make a variety of flavours which keep in the fridge for ages. However, all supermarkets have a Thai section now and green curry paste is very easy to come by. Of course, you can make your own, but even in Thailand most people buy it! If you would like a recipe, send me a message. You will also need 5 kaffir lime leaves or the zest of two limes. You can buy fresh kaffir lime leaves and keep them in the freezer and chuck them in straight from it. It wouldn’t be a Thai dish without fish sauce, it’s funny isn’t it? Like shrimp paste, it’s truly 
disgusting on its own, but tastes amazing in the curry. Sorry, I digress, you need 2 tablespoons of fish sauce, again most supermarkets have it, if you can’t get it, light soya sauce will do. 2 teaspoons of soft brown sugar and a tin of coconut milk, (splash out calorie-wise and get the whole fat one, the low-fat simply isn’t as creamy and doesn’t have the body). To garnish you need either Thai basil, or fresh english basil finely chopped.
Method: In a frying pan or a wok, add 1 teaspoon of vegetable oil and over a medium heat, fry the curry paste for a moment, add the lemon grass, kaffir leaves, fish sauce, sugar and coconut, reduce the heat to low and cook for 5 minutes. Now, the brilliant thing about this dish is that if you are cooking for a dinner party, you can do all this in advance and then when you are ready to cook, bring the sauce back to a simmer, add the prawns and cook for 5 minutes, add the basil and then serve with steamed jasmine rice. Simple! I sometimes garnish this with some fried chopped red chillies and chopped cashew nuts, but you don’t have to. This dish also works with chopped chicken breast, too.
To cook your Jasmine rice (Serves 2-4): Rinse 100g of rice under the cold tap until the water runs clear, place in a saucepan and add 200 mls of cold water. Bring to the boil and then cover with a tight fitting lid and place on the very lowest possible heat for 7 to 10 minutes until the excess water has steamed off. Turn off the heat and leave for a further 5 minutes. For different flavours, add a kaffir lime leaf to the water or replace some of the water with coconut milk or chicken stock. Don’t forget that Jasmine rice is meant to be sticky and is a different consistency to long grain and basmati. Enjoy and try and get someone to give you that foot rub!
The Bombay Boys 