Lockdown Edition Week 18: Prawns with Rice and Fennel

The book: Good Housekeeping New Step-by-Step Cookbook

The recipe: p136, "Prawns with Rice and Fennel"

We're back in reliable old Good Housekeeping territory, which usually translates to "nothing spectacular but nothing terrible either". The very worst kind of thing to blog about, in other words. Just what you want in the hottest week of the year when motivation is already at a sweat-drenched low to begin with. Hurrah!

Last time round, at least there was the novelty of me having to handle duck for the first time. Here, even that kind of pleasure is spared: I already have a bit of a thing for fennel, not least thanks to the devil's fennel recipe from The Silver Spoon that I've mentioned about twenty million times already, while prawns are a rare-ish but by no means unprecedented treat in this household. And as for rice... well, I make this the fifth Random Kitchen selection in the last eight weeks to involve it in one form or another. (Six if you include the teaspoon of rice that Madhur bizarrely got me to add as seasoning to her noodles a few weeks ago.)

Still, random.org will have its way - and for all a recipe name like "Prawns with Rice and Fennel" sounds unambitious, I'm certainly not against any of the concepts involved - so it's off to the shops I go...

The prep: Straight away, I have a decision to make and a compromise to contemplate. The recipe wants me to buy shell-on prawns, peeling, beheading and de-veining them before using them in the recipe with their tails still on. Not only would this be a right old faff (as if Lewisham Asda is going to give me "real" prawns to work with anyway), there's nothing in the method to suggest any benefit to doing it this way, so I take the lazy/easy route and buy some raw peeled ones.

Asda isn't exactly known for its high-grade fennel either - seriously, just look at the reviews - and indeed, what I encounter in-store is fairly pitiful in size and quality. I've had significantly better in a £1-a-scoop bargain haul from the market in front of the Lewisham shopping centre, and I end up buying two weedy Asda specimens just to hit the "1 large bulb" requirement of the recipe - but as I keep on saying, I'm still very much in a "minimal unnecessary journeys" mindset at the minute, so the fact I've found fennel there at all (and dill too!) is good enough for me. Beggars can't be choosers.

The recipe also calls for two large courgettes (we've all had nights like that). As it turns out, this week's veg box delivery has given me these slightly battered big bois that need using up. Imperfectly perfect!

The making: For once, we have a recipe in which the order of the instructions makes good sense! I suppose that's the kind of crazily practical approach you get from Good Housekeeping as opposed to, ooh, let's say someone whose name rhymes with Bovelli.

What I mean specifically is that I start by cooking some brown rice as per the instructions, giving me exactly the time I need to prepare all the other ingredients: dicing the courgettes, "thinly slicing" the fennel (I don't really have the patience to do this with any degree of elegance, but my haphazard slices are good enough for the purpose), crushing some garlic, measuring out some butter and some vegetable stock, and chopping "2 tbsp" of dill. Obviously that means more like 4 tbsp because I'm half-Swedish and dill is awesome.

 

The recipe wants me to cook the rice for "about 30 minutes until tender". I reckon it's basically done enough after 22 minutes or so - even for brown rice, doing it for longer would seem excessive since it's going to be cooked a little more at the end of proceedings.

Here's the tender coming

Next up, then, it's time to get my wok-slash-frying pan heated to a high old temperature before adding oil. The prawns are thrown in and stir-fried very briefly until they turn pink, then they're removed and set aside.

I then heat some more oil in the same pan and stir-fry the fennel slices for three minutes, then I add the diced courgette and give that a minute or two as well. This doesn't seem like an especially long time, and I also seem to have a lot of vegetable here for a dish that's meant to serve 4 people (which, as we've established, tends to correspond to "me and Sam with maybe half a portion left over")...

 

...but who am I to argue? Next, the rice (having been drained and rinsed) goes into the pan along with some seasoning. Then it's time to add back the prawns and the stock, which I "bring to the boil and cook gently for 3-4 minutes".

Except it's quite hard to bring 150ml of liquid to the boil when it instantly disappears into a huge mass of fennel, courgette and rice. Still, I keep cooking and stirring for the required time and everything seems to be basically heated through, so I guess that's good enough. Finally, right before serving, a knob of butter is stirred through along with the garlic and the dill, and we're ready to roll.

Speaking of serving, I decide it might be a nice idea to hold back a bit of dill to sprinkle on top of the finished dish. Unfortunately, this just makes it look like our dinner has gotten dangerously close to someone mowing the lawn. Oh well.

  

The eating: There's something missing here, and we can't quite work out what it is. The quantity and the crispness of the vegetables actually works well, despite my earlier reservations, and the prawns are nicely cooked for once (I'm a bugger for overdoing them out of paranoia). Not having to pick them up and remove the tails as we go is, if anything, a bonus. And even the slight excess of dill turns out to be just right. As a whole, though, this is... well, there's no escaping it: it's quite bland.

What with the prawns and the crunchy veg, Sam likens it to a Thai curry, only without any of the spice or flavour. My "yes, and" is to compare it to a risotto without the cheese (and hence most of the fun). In any case, the lack of ambition indicated by the recipe name is reflected in what comes out at the other end.

Between the ingredients and the general safeness, it feels a bit like eating the 1980s. It's not that the Good Housekeeping cookbook - published in 1993 and revised in 1998 - is so sturdy and reliable that it doesn't dare to feature any dishes you'd describe as contemporary even now; there's a fairly convincing-looking take on ceviche nearby, for example. But this? It's all a bit Findus Lean Cuisine.

Still, it's not bad at all - there are good and interesting ingredients in here, and plenty of flavours I like generally, so it was never going to be a total wipeout. It just could have been a whole lot more adventurous.

Two-word verdict: Ruggedly solid.