Garlic, Lemon Prawns

If you're one of my regular visitors, you'll have noticed that I haven't posted anything for a while.  Some of you have even emailed me to check up on me, and I appreciate your thoughts and concern more than you can ever know.

I'm not going to go into details here, this is not the place, but the reality is life has been pretty challenging for me lately, leaving me completely disinterested in food.  I've scarcely been bothered to eat it, let alone cook it or write blog posts about it.  But life goes on;  there are plenty of people who are faced with very much worse;  and the clouds are beginning to part sufficiently for me to get back into the kitchen today.

And I have the lovely Nicole at I Am a Honey Bee to thank for getting me back to the stove top.  It's Secret Recipe Club (**) time, and Nicole's blog was my assignment for the month.  Nicole lives in the Bay State with her husband, Price, and beyond gorgeous 16 month old daughter, Autumn.  She works in architecture, and like me she enjoys cooking, design and loves all things Greek.

*  So what's this Secret Recipe Club you may ask?  The club has over a hundred members, divided into four groups, and each month one member is assigned (in secret) to another member from their group.  That person then selects a recipe (or more) to make, photograph, and prepare a blog post - all in secret.  Then everyone in the group posts their recipe on the same day, and of course the secret is then out.  It's a always a thrill to find out who has posted something from your own blog, and to meet and discover some new blogs.   If you are a food blogger and interested in joining the Secret Recipe Club, be sure to check out the Join SRC page.

So several weeks of secretly browsing through Nicole's blog, has been enough to tantalise my jaded taste buds.  Dishes like 40 Cloves of Garlic Chicken, Scallop Salad, and VegetarianWontons with Spicy Soy Dipping Sauce all piqued my appetite and have been bookmarked for a later date.  But it was Nicole's delicious Garlic Lemon Shrimp that eventually lured me back into the kitchen.

This dish is incredibly quick and easy to put together (which is just perfect for me right now), and I took Nicole's advice of serving it with some crusty bread, though you could just as easily as she suggests serve it over some rice or pasta.  To keep things healthy I had a simple green salad on the side.  Other than adjusting quantities, as I was only cooking for one, I followed Nicole's recipe fairly closely - adding lemon zest and parsley being the only other changes I made.

Garlic, Lemon Prawns Recipe
Adapted from recipe from I Am a Honey Bee
Serves one as a main meal
Click here for a printable copy of this recipe

200g (7 oz) prawns or shrimps, shelled & deveined
3x cloves garlic, crushed
1 tablespoon butter, cut into small pieces
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon white wine
generous pinch of red pepper flakes
zest and juice of 1x lemon
flaky sea salt & freshly ground black pepper
1/2 lemon cut into wedges
generous handful of flat leaf parsley, roughly chopped

Preheat oven to 220 degrees C (450 degrees F).

Place prawns into a bowl.  Add the crushed garlic, butter, olive oil, wine, red pepper flakes, and lemon juice.  Add half the lemon zest, and set the remaining zest aside to use later.  Season generously with sea salt and black pepper, and mix everything together well.

Line a shallow baking dish with foil (makes the washing up easy later on), and spread the prawn mixture in the baking dish in a single layer.  Nestle lemon wedges in amongst the prawns, and place dish in the preheated oven.  Bake for 8-10 minutes, until the prawns have turned pink and cooked through.

If serving with crusty bread, place bread in the oven 5 minutes before the prawns finish to heat through.

Remove from the oven and use the foil to carefully transfer the prawns and all the lemony, garlicky juices to a serving dish.

Mix the reserved lemon zest with the chopped parsley and sprinkle over the top of the prawns and serve immediately.  Use crusty bread to mop up all those heavenly juices.

I hope you enjoy this dish as much as I did, and visit the links below to check out all the other great dishes my Secret Recipe Club friends made.

An InLinkz Link-up