Liv, Author at Egg Wan's Food Odyssey

Prawn and Lemon Butter Pasta

by Liv | Feb 4, 2017

At the end of 2016 we moved to the Marchmont area of Edinburgh and one of the many great things about Marchmont are the really incredible ingredients we can buy locally. We like just two streets away from two really great greengrocers and we also have quite possibly the best fishmongers in Edinburgh; Eddie’s Seafood Market.

Eddie’s are well known in Edinburgh for supplying many of the top restaurants in Edinburgh with their seafood and yes their seafood is a little more expensive than fish from supermarkets but the difference in quality is night and day. Have you ever bought king prawns from the supermarket and thought they are tasteless? Not from Eddie’s, I popped over a couple days, bought 500g of prawns and three sea urchin’s for £10 and the prawns were stunning, so full of flavour and the texture was beautiful.

I also love going to Eddie’s because Eddie and his family run the store and they are from Hong Kong but speak Chinese so I can go there and have a chat in Chinese. They also often give my daughter free sweets so she loves going there as well.

Importantly though they have a huge selection of fresh fish available. I’ve reduced my daughter’s hours at nursery and last Friday we had a trip around Marchmont which included painting a couple pots at Doodles Ceramic Workshop, grabbing a freshly baked 10” pizza from the local takeaway (£4 I think) and a trip to Eddie’s. As mentioned above I bought three sea urchin for £1 and they might be one of the ugliest things on the planet inside but they taste absolutely amazing. I’ll pop over again next week and if they are selling sea urchin I’ll buy some and use it in a dish.

Finally Eddie’s have an old fashioned Chinese business tradition to them. I originally got to know the staff at Eddie’s when I was working at the Witchery by the Castle and Tom from Eddie’s would deliver the fish. I would often sign for it and have a chat with him. I remember when I lived in Taiwan, sometimes I went to a traditional market with my grandmother and the vegetable vendors would always give their repeat customers extra ginger, chili or spring onions, those kinds of things. I think this is just how Eastern people do business. Eddie’s often do the same, a few extra prawns here and there so they absolutely rock.

But back to the dish today.

If you’re on a diet, this is probably not the dish for use. I used a lot of butter in this dish although you can adjust many of the ingredients including the amount of butter and lemon used. This is totally fine.

If you don’t have fresh chilli then you can use chili flakes. Lemon zest is optional but I highly recommend you to put lemon zest in as it will make your pasta taste so good!!

You may have also noticed this is my first pasta dish on this website! Well I’ve decided 2017 is the going to be the year where I start cooking a lot of different cuisines for this website. Even though this website is predominately about Chinese and Taiwanese food, my culinary training and the vast majority of my “working as a chef” experience is in Western food. So even though I know hell of a lot of Eastern recipes, I also know hell of a lot of Western dishes. So keep posted for all kinds of recipes this year.

Prawn and Lemon Butter Pasta

Course Main Dish

Cuisine Italian

Prep Time 15 minutes

Cook Time 10 minutes

Total Time 25 minutes

Servings 3 people

Ingredients

Main Ingredients

600 g fresh prawns peeled and devined
700 g cooked linguine
140 g butter I used Kerrygold
3 cloves garlic peeled and thinly sliced
1 chili remove seeds and chop finely
30 g fresh parsley chop finely
2 lemon just the zest
1.5 lemons juiced

Seasonings

1 tsp garlic powder
1 pinch salt to taste
1 pinch pepper to taste

Instructions

Peeled and devein the prawns.
Follow the packaging cooking directions to cook the linguine pasta. Once the linguine has cook to the texture you like, immediately drain the water and quickly rinse under cold water and drain. Drizzle some olive oil on the pasta and mix it up evenly. This will stop the pasta stick together. Leave it aside.
Gently heat up butter in a skillet or deep frying pan at low-medium heat.
Add garlic and chili into step 3 and gently fry the garlic until it starts to turn a light golden colour.
Add prawns into step 4 and once the prawns start changing their colour to pink then add the garlic powder, lemon juice, zest and pasta.
Cook the pasta for a further 2 minutes and mix evenly with all the ingredients.
Add parsley and mix evenly, season with salt and pepper. Ready to serve!

Thai Steamed Fish with Coconut Quinoa

by Liv | Jan 22, 2017

Thailand is one of my favourite countries and Thai food is easily one of my favourite cuisine. I’ve only visited Thailand once but the country, the culture, the weather and the food were all really amazing and one of my favourite dishes when I visited was Thai Steamed Fish.

So for my Sunday lunch I decided to make something out of the normal for me and had a go at recreating a Thai Steamed Fish dish I ate in Thailand but with a twist, with coconut quinoa. This dish is very easy to cook but it’s also packaged with protein and lots of energy.

I think in the recent “health food” trend, one of my favourite dishes is “quinoa”. I can’t believe how easy to cook and delicious it is but one of the most interesting things about it to me is that it’s a complete protein and contains multiple essential amino acids. It’s both very easy to cook and very fast. That it’s really delicious and has a great texture is a huge bonus. So if you don’t have any quinoa in your pantry I will recommend the next time you do a food shop grab yourself some.

I didn’t season the quinoa much and you may find depending on your taste it’s a bit plain but the key to this dish being delicious is the sauce that is used to steam the fish. It’s really delicious.

Ideally serve this dish while it’s still warm or hot. You can either serve the salmon whole or you can flake it and mix with the coconut quinoa and sauce and serve as a salad. When I made this dish I made one plate with the salmon whole and the other flaked, but both covered in sauce and both equally tasty.

You can use other kinds of fish with this recipe, it doesn’t necessarily have to be salmon. I used salmon because it’s easy to get hold of, cheap and I nearly always have salmon in my fridge or freezer. So feel free to use any kind of fish you want. From experience, sea bass, sea bream, cod, tilapia and trout all go well with this dish.

A little update of my life:

We’ve finally settled and unpacked into our new home! I love our new home because we have front and rear gardens and our neighbours so far are lovely. My daughter is going to school this autumn and the local primary school in the area we used to live is ranked on the lower end of the schools in Edinburgh. We’ve always been huge fans of the Marchmont area and that we found a property for the right place and one street away from the one of the best schools in the country is a bonus.

Now we have a garden I’m now able to use the garden to take the food photos where the light is infinitely better. If you check out my photos now and compare to photos months ago you’ll see a huge difference. We’ve also changed our style of photographing food, partly in rebellion to my cookbook publisher who always insists on strange angles.

So I have two main projects for our new home. One is to decorate it (the kitchen which also doubles up as my office (I’ll share photos soon) is well on it’s way and now we’ve found all our pictures we’re going to hang them soon. The other thing I want to do is tidy up the front garden. It’s awful and looks like nobody has touched it in years. The decorating project I’ll do now but I’ll wait until the weather improves before doing the garden.

Chris also completely updated this website and there’s loads more social media things going on. The recipes are all now formatted so search engines can index and find them easier. I’ve got an Instagram feed of which I update content for all the time. There’s also now a newsletter which for now contains content from both of my websites; Egg Wan’s Food Odyssey and Liv Wan Illustration.

As you may know I’m a real busy bee and I don’t have time right now to do separate newsletters but I’m sure you don’t mind seeing a collection of delicious recipes as well as some of my illustrations? So if you are interested in my newsletter, then you can type your email in the subscribe box on the right hand side of my site and subscribe. I will send you a newsletter periodically as well as giveaway news and some other things.

But back to this Thai Steamed Fish with Coconut Quinoa dish.