My fearless hunter or should I say fisher did himself proud and brought home about 115 prawns on his first forage. Prawns are part of the lifestyle of being in Desolation and like most things are best enjoyed fresh from the trap. Prawn salad is one of my favs for fresh prawns. Often when harvesting prawns, I poach them immediately. Poached prawns are a great base for many recipes. If it’s cold, we make Thai curries and Tom Yum Goong soup. When it’s hot salad rolls and a variety of salads.
A favourite source for Thai recipes is Hot-Thai-kitchen.com. Pailin also has a YouTube channel where she takes you through detailed information and recipes for Thai cooking – Pailin’s Kitchen. I highly recommend checking her sites out if you like Thai food.
Having lots of spices on the boat allows me to play with the best fresh ingredients. That said, prawns also keep incredibly well if you head and freeze them immediately in a small amount of salt water. As we are only passing through Desolation on this trip, we ate some and froze some to eat as we head around the island.
We ended up spending several days prawning, hiking, planning our trip in the Broughtons, and reading at Mink Cove. We were delighted to see one of the most beautiful rainbows that I have seen in years. It made it hard to leave the next day as we had seen some amazing weather patterns here. We live in such a beautiful place.
In fact we made 2 types of prawn salad on the same day. One made similar to tuna salad and the other simply a lovely salad with fresh poached prawns.
Prawn Salad
Description
Prawn salad is akin to tuna salad and can be used as a filling for sandwiches, as an appetizer with chips or crackers, as a topping for an actual salad or just eaten by the spoonful if you’re ravenous.
Ingredients
- Fresh poached prawns ( a good handful)
- 1/4 c diced celery
- 2 – 4 tbsp garlic mayonnaise (substitute: yoghurt or sour cream with diced garlic)
- Juice of. 1/2 lemon or more to taste
- 1/8 – 1/4 cup chopped chives
- 1/8 – 1/4 cup chopped cilantro
- 1/8 – 1/4 cup chopped basil
- 1/8 – 1/4 cup mint
- 1 thai red chili chopped or a dash of your favourite chili oil or hot sauce
Instructions
Step one: poach the prawns. Place prawns in a pan and cover with boiling water. Once they turn red, this should take no more than 1 minute, immediately plunge them in cold water. Obviously on the boat I use ocean water to conserve our fresh but if you are at home keep running them under cold water until they are cool. Unless you have asbestos hands, they can be tricky to peel when warm so I suggest further refrigerating them for about half an hour before peeling. Once the prawns are peeled, roughly dice them.
In a bowl, combine the prawns, mayonnaise, lemon juice, herbs and hot sauce. You might want to start with less mayonnaise in the beginning so that you can adjust to your desired “wetness”. Serve immediately using bread, naan, lettuce etc or just eat directly from the spoon.
If you choose to just poach your prawns, you could simply make a luscious salad. This one has pickled onions and cucumber added with a bit of preserved lemon. Delicious !
