Prawn Rice(Srilankan style)

Shrimp Rice. Roiyaalu Annam. Eral/Iral Saadham. Era Saadham. Kekda Biriyani/Chaawal.

This is my PostGrad classmate ‘Anne Sundari’s recipe! She is a SriLankan Tamil girl! She is a great cook herself. She used to cook for her own lunch box! Almost everyday she comes with a seafood in her lunch box! Myself and my other hostel classmates used to devour it in minutes! Oh my goodness and she never gets angry at all! She was the one who told me ‘cooking is fun’! Hmmmmmm I never agreed with her back then!

Well….that particular day she had this shrimp rice in her box. Everyone were very skeptical to taste it….coz the shrimps were with whole shells actually. For the first time she was going round and round and asking everyone to taste it! No one was dare enough…like me! Ha ha….anyway it tasted great!As she had actually picked very small variety of shrimps/prawns for this recipe. And as she fried it over high heat. The shells had turned crispier! But never did I knew before that the shells are palatable! They also tasted good to me!

Anyways….I don’t know what she called this recipe. I named it as ‘Annie’s Prawn Rice’ for my convenience! Well…to have some signature to this recipe….I used samba rice and I also fried the rice for a brief time. Well….since I could not find that type of prawns all the time in market, I started using regular ones. And I use only the tail fins on ones.

Ingredients:

Small sized prawns with shell(optional) half kg
Garlic 50-100 gms crushed finely without adding water
Lemon juice half cup
Dry red chillies roasted and freshly grated
Tomato puree 3-4 teaspoons
Turmeric powder half spoon
Mustard half spoon
Cumin seeds half spoon
Curry leaves 3-5 twigs
Oil 1 cup
Cold cooked rice (short grained or long grained)

Method:

Any long grained rice cooked with salt and ghee without stickiness. Generally I use Seeraga Samba rice for this(back there-India). For 1 cup of rice 1 and 1/2 cup of water. A spoon full of salt and few spoons of ghee is added….to avoid the stickiness of rice. Spread the rice in a tray. Flip with fork….allow it to cool down. Now the rice will be stiff and well separated.

1. In a large bowl marinate washed prawns, salt, turmeric, chili flakes, lemon juice and set this aside.

2. Take a shallow frying pan and add oil. Now add mustard, cumin seeds, curry leaves and fry for 2 minutes.

3. Then add garlic and fry it till golden-reddish brown.

4. Now add onions and fry till reddish brown.

5. Now add tomato puree to the above. Fry them till all water content evaporates and oil shows up in the top.

6. Now stir-in marinated prawns/shrimps and cook them without adding any water. Cover and cook over medium heat.

7. Once the prawn is cooked with its own water content…stir-fry them over high heat for another few minutes without lid.

8. When its almost dry and roasted add rice to it and mix it well without removing it from the stove…preferably in high flame…by spraying little oil.

9. Garnish them with fried curry leaves before serving.

Small prawns can be cooked without removing shells but by only removing little carapace and appendages.One can go for shell less prawn if it is too large. Retaining tail-shell alone is also okay.