Quick and easy

Tonight, I cooked a recipe from Claudia Roden's Arabesque cookbook that was deliciously rich and aromatic and yet so quick and easy to cook.

Usually we use supermarket-bought, ready-peeled prawns, but now that we have a fishmongers on our doorstep, buying large king prawns still in their shells by the bag is easy now. We'd stocked up over the weekend and tonight M avoided my bad temper brought on by a stressful work day by losing himself in the patient work of shelling and deveining. When he'd finished, he escaped me and it was my turn to take over the kitchen.

I fried a medium sized onion and three cloves of chopped garlic in extra virgin olive oil in a heavy saucepan until they turned translucent. I added two cans of chopped tomatoes, a teaspoon of ground ginger, a pinch of saffron threads, a teaspoon of red chilli powder and a pinch of salt, gave it a stir, brought to the boil then simmered for twenty minutes with an extra two cups of boiling water.

After twenty minutes of simmering I added the fifteen prawns (for two) and cooked them in the stew until they turned pink. Taking the stew off the heat, I stirred in a medium bunch of chopped parsley and a medium bunch of chopped coriander and we ate it with Basmati rice.

The prawns were big and succulent in the spicy stew. The perfect post-work meal on a cold winter night.