Creamy Prawn Tikka Masala

If there’s one food I miss while travelling it’s Indian.

Mexican, Italian, American, Chinese and even sometimes English food can be sought in many foreign countries but when it comes to Indian, I’m always at a loss.

It doesn’t help that I’ve been spoiled my whole life by the amazing Indian food you can get in the UK. The only place I have come close to enjoying some authentic Indian food was in Malaysia last year, where the cheese naan bread and tandoori chicken was enough to entice me to eat at the same restaurant four times in two weeks.

But usually, I have to settle for jars of curry sauce or curry paste. Which I don’t mind, as some of them are actually quite good for a quick fix. As I’m in my apartment in Istanbul with no oven *sigh* (I’ll stop talking about it soon, I promise…), then stovetop dinners are the norm around here for a while. But that doesn’t mean that even if you have to use a jar of curry sauce to get your Indian fix that it has to be an unhealthy or uneventful meal.

Just by adding a couple of other ingredients, you can really lift the flavour of a jar of suace and even add a few veggies in there to make it healthier.

In this version of prawn tikka masala, I added frozen prawns (defrosted thoroughly before cooking), an onion, garlic (although there is garlic in the sauce, in my opinion you can never have too much – and true Indian food uses bucketloads of the stuff), a red pepper (for sweetness) and the special ingredient…a touch of coconut oil.

You wouldn’t believe how a little coconut oil can lift the flavour of the sauce, which typically usually has some coconut in it already.

So there you have it – a quick and easy weeknight dinner that is pretty damn tasty and not expensive at all.

Creamy Prawn Tikka Masala

Recipe by Julia

Servings

2

servings

Prep time

10

minutes

Cooking time

20

minutes

Ingredients

• 1 medium onion, diced

• 1 clove of garlic, diced

• 1 red bell pepper, diced

• 2 cups of small prawns (defrosted if using frozen)

• 1 jar of Tikka Masala curry sauce (I used Sharwood’s)

• 1 tbsp organic coconut oil

Directions

• Add a little oil to a large frying pan and cook the onion, garlic and red pepper on a medium heat until soft and translucent.
• Tip the prawns into the pan and cook for only a couple of minutes, until the prawns turn pink.
• Pour the curry sauce into the pan and turn the heat down low. Leave to simmer for around 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the sauce thickens and the peppers have softened further.
• Stir the coconut oil into the curry and cook for a further one to two minutes.
• Remove from the heat and serve the curry immediately with rice and/or naan bread.