Burmese Chilli Prawns with Hot & Sour Asian Slaw - Salad Days # 8

This week at I Heart Cooking Clubs we're exploring the theme "East Meets West", choosing Diana Henry fusion dishes with a global influence.

Living here in New Zealand, I'm no stranger to fusion food - I'm sure the same can be said for most of my "neighbours" on the Pacific Rim.  It has always fascinated me, in just about any country, the influence that its immigrants has on the local food culture.  When I was growing up, Chicken Chop Suey at the local Chinese restaurant was about as exotic as it got.  In the last 20 years, however, increasing numbers of Asian immigrants has had a huge influence on the New Zealand culinary landscape.  Previously unheard of ingredients are now readily available;  Thai, Vietnamese, Indian, Malaysian, Burmese, Bangladeshi, and Indonesian restaurants abound;  and even the pantries of this nation's most unadventurous cooks would boast a bottle of soy sauce at the very least.

Looking through Diana Henry'd book A Change of Appetite, I thought her Burmese Chilli Fish with Hot & Sour Salad was the perfect dish to fit the brief.  The hot and sour salad, which is essentially an Asian take on a classic cole slaw seemed like the epitome of fusion food to me.  I made quite a few changes to the recipe ... For a start I replaced the fish with prawns, and tweaked the curry paste a little.  And I rang a few changes to the salad as well - adding in some red cabbage along with the white, and adding carrot, green papaya, cherry tomatoes, mint and peanuts to the slaw, and as I did with the curry paste I tweaked the dressing a bit.

This dish definitely had the wow factor - an absolute explosion of flavours and textures, and just enough heat to leave my lips tingling at the end of it ... in a good way.  If you like Asian flavours, I urge you to give this a try the next time you have cole slaw on your mind.

Burmese Chilli Prawns with Hot & Sour Asian Slaw Recipe
Inspired by recipe from Diana Henry
from A Change of Appetite
Serves 2 as a substantial meal

For the Burmese Chilli Prawns:
300g raw prawns, shells removed and deveined
1x clove garlic, roughly chopped
generous pinch of salt
piece of fresh ginger about the size of your thumb, grated
1/2 red chilli, roughly chopped (deseed if you like less heat)
1 teaspoon ground turmeric
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1 teaspoon lime juice

For the Hot & Sour Asian Slaw:
1x cup finely shredded white cabbage
1x cup finely shredded red cabbage (plus extra leaves for serving)
1x carrot finely shredded (a julienne peeler is ideal)
1x cup finely shredded green papaya
2x radishes, thinly sliced (a mandoline works perfectly if you have one)
12x cherry tomatoes, halved (use different colours if you can)
generous handful of mint leaves, roughly chopped
large handful of roasted peanuts, roughly chopped
1/2 red chilli, roughly chopped (deseed if you like less heat)

For the dressing:
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1 tablespoon rice wine vinegar
1 tablespoon honey
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon fish sauce
1 teaspoon lime juice

Preheat oven to 180 degrees C (350 degrees F).

Place garlic, salt, ginger, chilli, turmeric, olive oil, sesame oil and lime juice in a mortar and pestle, and grind to a paste.  Add paste to the prawns, and toss until all the prawns are well coated in the paste.  Put prawns in a single layer in an ovenproof dish, and bake in the preheated oven until cooked through - depending on the size of your prawns this will take between 5 and 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, place the dressing ingredients in a small jar and shake vigorously until well combined.  Taste and then adjust to your liking - you want a good balance of sweet-sour-salty, so play around with the ingredients until you get the flavour just right.

Place all the slaw ingredients in a large bowl, drizzle liberally with the dressing, and toss gently until everything is well combined.

Serve immediately piled into red cabbage leaves, and arrange prawns on the side.

If you would like to get to know Diana Henry a little better, and to see what everyone else has cooked up this week, then do go and visit my friends at I Heart Cooking Clubs and check out the links (who knows, you might even want to join the journey and cook along with us) ...

... or check out A Change of Appetite and Diana's many other great titles available from Amazon USA, Amazon UK, or Fishpond NZ.

I'm also sharing this at Souper (Soup, Salad & Sammie) Sundays, hosted by my very lovely friend Deb at Kahakai Kitchen, and at Weekend Cooking, hosted by the lovely Beth at Beth Fish Reads.

This is salad number 8 in my Salad Days, 28 days of salad project.   What's that you ask?  Well,  I've said it here a dozen times or more ... I love salads.  A big bowl, substantial salad is hands down my favourite meal any time of the year.  Such is my love of salad, that I'm challenging myself to come up with a different salad every day for the month of February - that's 28 days of salads - and I plan to share as many of them as I can with you.  I'll also be doing some flashbacks to some of my favourite salads I've shared in the past.

What's more, I'm giving you the opportunity to share some of your favourite salads with me too.  Have a favourite salad you'd like to share?  Simply link up your salad recipe using the linky tool at the bottom of this post.  The linky will be open all month, and you can join in any day or every day, and link as many recipes as you like.  Feel free to grab the Salad Days badge from the sidebar to include in your post if you'd like to.  There's really no rules around linking up, other than please, use your manners and link your post back to this one.  Linking old posts is fine too, just please edit them to include the back link.  Thanks for sharing your favourite salad with us.