Retro love - Prawn Cocktail

Some matches never get old. Tomatoes and basil, apples and cinnamon, fish and chips with lemon, red wine and cheese. Cold prawns with 1970s cocktail sauce. Mmmmm awesome.... Forthcoming - a particularly old-school, but not tired recipe. You might have a similar one in a frayed, 30 year old cookbook somewhere. Not new, old, done a thousand times and more. But here it is again.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups Prawns - cleaned, cooked, peeled and cooled. (you can buy them this way)
• 1 avocado
• 1 baby cos lettuce
• 1 lemon

     for the sauce:

• 2 egg yolks
• 1 tsp mustard (I use Dijon)
• 1 tbsp vinegar (I use white wine)
• 2/3 cup olive oil
• 2 tbsp cream, whisked to soft peaks
• dash tomato sauce
• dribble Worcestershire sauce
• Tabasco to taste
• salt and pepper to taste

Chicken and Herb Salad

The problem with living life as a hedonista is that you tend to get fat - all of that overindulgence eventually catches up with you. I have a friend who refuses to let that get him down - he laughs and pops another cholesterol pill with his saucisson, and says that life would be meaningless without good food. I however, also take pleasure from wearing beautiful clothes, and at the moment, all I fit into is tents from Carrefour.

So. Diet. But what diet for a hedonista? The Atken's Diet of course. Well, maybe an abridged one - I simply avoid all starches (rather than all carbohydrates including sugars) every second day, and amazingly, it works. When things get really bad, I have to go weeks on end without starch, but that has a particularly cranky side effect. 

Green means hot

I am a very fortunate lady. Not only have I got a husband who very cleverly got us an expat stint in the centre of the world, but I also have Mary in our household. The title of "housemaid" does not fully describe her position or influence. Some days she is Maid, others Nanny, but my favorite is Chef. Mary is Tamil Sri Lankan, and so much of her food is in that vein, but she is also an exceptional study and has a remarkably good palate, so anything she finds lying in the bottom of a fridge drawer or at the back of a pantry can be added to other flavours to make something wonderful. The only underlying theme - chilli, and boy oh boy, she does like it hot!

The other week she made what she calls "herb relish". It has leafy herbs and onion and green chili, and is amazing next to her curried eggplant. It inspired me to make the sauce below - I love the fresh flavours, and imagined it without the rice, but with cucumber in it to cool that chili a little. So here we have my spicy green salad: