Prawn Bostadar

We cooked some prawn sambal bostadar the other day and given that this blog has been silent for about a month now, I thought I'd put up an entry on this. Prawn bostadar is a very, very Eurasian dish. It is more commonly called green chilli prawn sambal, and used to make sandwiches with. In fact, what I like doing is eating the dish itself one day and eating the left over chillis in sandwiches the next morning for breakfast. Talk about eating your cake and having it too. But the traditional Eurasian birthday party tea (at least, for those living in Katong) would have red chilli and green chilli sambal sandwiches, sausage rolls from Chin Mee Chin, (next to Holy Family Church), and a birthday cake from either Cona Confectionary (other side of Holy Family Church) or Tay Buan Guan's cake shop (see older post here). Plus other goodies of course! And we'd play games like "Musical Chairs", "Passing the Parcel", "Crocodile, Crocodile, may we cross your river" and the like.

But back to the dish. Prawn Bostadar is a sambal, but because of the coconut milk it is not really a dry sambal (in fact the way I cook it is a rather wet sambal, coz I like the gravy on the rice). What makes it really unique is that the chillis are not used as a garnish, but as a vegetable - they appear in this dish in the same quantities as you would expect, for example, green beans to appear in a vegetable dish. And they are meant to be eaten! A dish not for the faint hearted indeed. I've used the proportions from the recipe in Mary Gomes' book, "The Eurasian Cookbook" but I've slightly varied the method. The major difference is that lazy people some of us are, the spices are pureed using a blender.

Ingredients

300g prawns, shelled and deveined

10 sliced green chillis (more, if you like)

1 teaspoon sugar

125ml (or so) thick coconut milk (I tend to add more)

5 cloves garlic, sliced finely

For the rempah (spice mix):

10 shallots

5 buah keras (or candlenut)

1 small cube belacan (Mary Gomes says 1 teaspoon.)

1 teaspoon kunyit (tumeric) powder (you can use the tumeric root - maybe about 1 cm's worth - but I always stain my fingers with this so I'd go with the powder).

Pound or blend (using the blender) these ingredients together. It's important not to skimp on the candlenut, and not to overdo the belacan or kunyit powder. Dish should come out a nice, sunny yellow rather than a bright orange.

Instructions:

1. Heat oil in saucepan and when hot, fry the garlic till golden brown. Remove from heat, dry on kitchen towels.

2. Add the rempah to the pan. Fry until fragrant, don't let it burn (medium-lowish heat)

3. Add the green chillis, and cook for a few minutes.

4. Add the prawns and fry (turn up heat). Because they cook quickly, after 1 minute or so, add in the coconut milk and sugar. Let the coconut milk thicken.

5. Remove from heat, serve garnished with garlic.