King prawns and Okra in coconut gravy

After all the sweet posts that I have been doing recently, its high time that I spice up my blog with little bit of hot posts like curries or anything that doesn’t have Sugar in it. Let me begin with the prawn and okra curry. Well, about the curry, it always reminds me of my dad. It is one of my dad’s favourite dishes that he constantly talks about whenever my mom prepares it at home. He used to tell us how his mother prepared this dish by picking up the fresh okra from her kitchen garden and fresh, live prawns from the fish monger. Nothing would taste so good as using very fresh and organic vegetables and cooking them straight from the garden. It all happens in golden olden days. But now, where the life is going faster than it should be, supermarket bought stuff are the only choice. My dad is a great prawn lover and is my husband. So my mom kept on making so many dishes with prawn for my dad and so I’m following her footsteps now making prawn dishes for my Husband. This particular curry very well goes with pathiri, plain boiled rice, poori, chappaathi, neypathiri, ottil pollichathu etc. I hope I will post the recipes of all these one by one slowly.

Ingredients

King prawns 200 gm (shelled)
Medium sized Okra – 15 no.s
Onion – 2 cups thinly sliced (2 large ones)
Tomato – 3 small / 2 medium size, chopped
Green chilly – 2 nos (slit lengthwise)
Kashmiri Chilli Powder – 2 tspful
Coriander Powder -2 tspful
Turmeric powder – ½ tsp
Coconut Milk- 1 ½ cup ()
Fennel seeds -1 tsp
Salt – as reqd.
Water – ½ cup appx.
Mustard seeds – 1 tsp
Curry leaves – 2 twigs
Coconut oil – 4-5 tbs

Preparation:
1. Keep a medium sized sauce pan in medium flame and add 1-2 tbs of oil.
2. Add onions, tomatoes, green chilli and salt and close the lid and cook for about 5 minutes or until tomatoes go soft. The flame should not be too high and the water from the onion should not dry up as well. Don’t make the flame too low as well.
3. At this point, add chilli powder, coriander powder, prawns and stir well. Keep simmering in medium flame until prawns are almost cooked. If the gravy seems too dry, add half cup of water and close the lid.
4. Meanwhile grind the fennel seeds along with turmeric in coconut milk. Keep them aside.
N.B: I used freshly grated coconut about ½ cup and ground it with sufficient water to get 1 ½ cup pf thick coconut milk.
5. When the prawns are ¾ cooked, add Okra and simmer well until the okra is cooked and is tender. Take care not to overcook it. Keep checking from time to time.
When okra is cooked well, add the coconut milk and heat just until it starts bubbling. Don’t keep boiling because it will curdle.
6. Switch off the flame.

For tempering

Heat another pan and add couple of tablespoon of oil. When the pan is smoking hot, add mustard seeds and cover with a lid. When they finish spluttering add curry leaves and let them splutter for a few seconds. Add this tampered oil to the curry made earlier. Serve hot with rice.