Coconut Vanilla Prawn Curry

Mum just returned from a trip to French Polynesia, Tahiti in fact and this is a recipe that she brought back. It is divine and it's got an unusual ingredient in it. It's a prawn curry that has vanilla in it and the flavour is just exquisite. You think vanilla it's something that you'd have in a sweet context but it works really well in a curry just like this. Particularly when you've got really subtle flavours, aromatic flavours, it's not too hot so there's no chilli in it. It's got turmeric, ginger, vanilla and lime. Now here are these stunning Australian prawns. Look at that, you don't get any better than that. I've peeled them and I've deveined them and I've also kept all of the shells. Now the shells have so much flavour in it so we're going to make a prawn stock to add to our prawn curry. So I've just been preheating a saute pan. You want this to be quite hot. I'm going to add a splash of peanut oil. I like to use a peanut oil because it's quite neutral in flavour and then just be careful because it is going to spit a little bit. So what we want to do here is keep mixing them until they change colour and look at that because this is so hot it's changing to a vibrant orange colour. That's exactly what we want. Now we want to add some water to make the stock. So in with the water. That's just about three quarters of a cup of water. We don't need too much because we want a concentrated stock here and we're just going to let that bubble away for a few minutes before I strain it. Now on to a gorgeous little flavour bomb of ginger and turmeric. Now I was lucky enough to get my hands on some fresh turmeric. If you can't find fresh turmeric of course you can just use some ground turmeric with the ginger. I'm just going to grab a knife and I'm going to just roughly chop my ginger and I'm going to pop that into my mortar and pestle along with our turmeric. Fresh turmeric is just such a treat when you get it. Yes it does taste like the ground turmeric but it's more floral, more intense in flavour. It is just stunning particularly with a dish like this. I'll add a pinch of salt and we're just going to bruise this until it forms a paste. Once I've done that I'm going to strain the prawn stock. Okay so I've strained the prawn stock. You can see that there's not much left but that's okay. We only need a small amount of that. We've got our lovely turmeric and ginger and now we can start putting the whole curry together. We can add some more of that peanut oil, splash and then in with some French shallot. There's a lot of French inspiration coming from French Polynesia of course and they use a lot of French shallot. It's milder in flavour. I do like it for a curry like this and I have finely chopped it so we're just going to fry that off for a moment while I prepare my vanilla. I just adore vanilla beans so we're just going to add one. By adding one whole vanilla bean and all its beautiful seeds you're going to get the most incredible perfume. So what I like to do is just warm it up in my hands just to release some of the seeds from the pot. I can already smell it. I just love it. We're going to carefully cut down the centre of it just to expose all the seeds. So just do it with a really sharp tip knife all the way down just like that. We're going to open it up and I'm going to scrape the seeds out. So just from the top there, scrape it. Then we'll do that on the other side. There we go and that's all the beautiful seeds that we're going to add into the curry and I'm not wasting this pod. This pod will also go into the curry. So these shallots are looking good in with all our prawns and you want to coat the prawn in all the shallots and we just want to start the cooking process. We don't want them to be completely cooked because they are going to cook in the sauce and I do want them to get the flavour from the vanilla and the coconut milk too. So I'm just going to grab some tongs and if they sear on one side we just want to quickly turn them on the other so we get some even heat. See how they're just starting to change colour now? That's what we're after. To this we're going to add our turmeric and ginger and already that smells fantastic. Once it's quite aromatic we can go in with our prawn stock. Give that a bit of a jiggle. At the same time we're going to add our coconut milk and we'll give that a stir. How beautiful does that look? Now we just need to cook those prawns through and thicken up this sauce and as we know prawns don't take long at all to cook. Nothing worse than an overcooked prawn so don't overcook them. I will add the vanilla pod at this stage. Lid goes on. I'm going to cook this for about four to five minutes until they're just cooked and that's when I add my vanilla beans and hint of lime. That smells fantastic. The prawns are cooked. Look at the colour how that's transformed because of the turmeric. I just love this curry so much. Now time for our gorgeous vanilla beans. Just there and just mix that in. See I can see all the speckles there. I want to leave the seeds to the last minute because it is so delicate. If you add them too early then the flavour will cook off and we don't want that. So just leaving it to the last minute. Fresh lime juice. It's a real tropical feel here. Good squeeze in there. Some rice just onto a plate just on the side. Just tip that out and we'll grab some of these plump prawns. Place them on the side of the rice. Lovely generous puddle of that vanilla coconut and turmeric sauce. Just pour that over just to really emphasise the vanilla that we've added. Remember how we added that vanilla pod? I just think it looks quite sweet for presentation and that is a gorgeous curry with a very luxurious ingredient there, our vanilla. It's not just for vanilla ice cream and custard, it's also fantastic in savoury dishes just like this one.