Lots of catch-up to do.  I’ll start with the fanciest recipe of the week. Before I forget the modifications I made. This recipe is from Nigella Express and she rightfully included it in her quick recipes book. It’s an easy and not particularly time consuming recipe. However, the list of ingredients is demanding.  Since I got her book, I noticed that there’s couple of fancy ingredients that she uses repeatedly, so, I got them and now I’m ready!  I have  chile oil, fish sauce and coconut extract. Nigella doesn’t quite use coconut extract. But she uses coconut milk and coconut yogurt, which I cannot find in the local supermarkets so I mix regular yogurt and milk with coconut extract to bring out the taste.  Don’t let me confuse you. No coconut yogurt for this recipe.  Coconut yogurt is used in the Carribean Cream dessert that I made yesterday and will put up shortly.

Recipe

Ingredients

• 2 spring onions, sliced
• 1 tablespoon chile oil (it’s really hot!)
• 1 tablespoon canola oil
• 4 teaspoons fish sauce
• about 2 cups milk mixed with 2 teaspoons coconut extract
• 2 cups chicken stock
• 3-4  cups butternut squash cubed
• 1 sweet potato cubed
• 1 pound frozen shrimp (uncooked, no tail on)
• 1-2 cups mango cubes
• 2 teaspoons lime juice (ok  to use lemon)
• 3-4 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro or parsley

How to make: Saute the spring onion in the chile and canola oil. Add the coconut milk, chicken stock and fish sauce and bring to a boil. Add the butternut squash and sweet potato cubes and cook at low temperature for  15–20 minutes or until soft. Add the cleaned, washed and drained shrimp. When it comes to a boil again add the mango and lime juice and cook for a few more minutes until the shrimp is cooked.  Sprinkle with chopped cilantro or parsley and serve on top of white rice.

Notes and tips: Nigella uses only chile oil, which is really hot. So, I split the required quantity between chile oil and canola oil. Now that I made the dish I see it may not have been necessary to do that as the dish comes very mild and sweet from the squash and the sweet potato. Something to try next time. As I made it this time,  it came out with  really fine, smooth, sweet and aromatic.  Nigella also uses red Thai curry paste that I omitted altogether.  If you are in Greece checking out this recipe, butternut squash has the same taste as “kolokitha”.  You can approximate the chile oi taste by mixing regular olive oil with hot pepper. For the fish sauce, . I’m sure fish stock would work but it has to be quite concentrated. The fish sauce has a pretty strong fishy taste.