Goan prawn curry with basmati rice; morello cherry tart

Many apologies for the lack of posts the past few days: as my Facebook followers know (and if you don’t, please come and join us!) I have been having a flare of my chronic pain, which I eventually discovered was related, at least in part, by a lurking cold bug. Why a cold, which affects the respiratory system, should worsen the neuropathic pain in my legs and feet, I really don’t know: I will just have to put it down to the mysterious “joys” of having a chronic illness.

A decent night’s sleep, untroubled by pain for the first time in several days (or nights), helped immeasurably, and when I told mum I was feeling better enough to cook dinner, rather than simply moving stuff from freezer to oven to plate, she gave me a big hug, so your (un)faithful food blogger is back. A good quantity of sweet stuff has helped give me energy, and that’s the only reason I’ve had so much of it. Honest.

Having spent much of the past few days lying on my bed, watching wind and rain and the occasional invading dog¹, I was pleased to get out into the sunny garden, balancing on my crutches while taking photos of things I hadn’t seen without a pane of glass between us since last summer. I couldn’t go beyond the small patio, as my crutches would probably have sunk without trace in the lake that has semi-permanently taken over the lawn, but I was outside, and upright, and that’s not something I will take for granted for quite some time.

To celebrate my return to feeling well enough to do things, I grabbed another Simply Cook box and got started on turning this:

into a curry. As this isn’t a sponsored post (although, as always, I’m open to the idea if you are, Simply Cook), I won’t talk too much about how easy it was to cook (although it was), and will focus on the finished product. It was a bit runny, as the required amount of coconut milk gave barely enough sauce to cover the bottom of the pan (OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it clearly wasn’t enough) so I added the rest of the tin and created a curry soup².

The end result was tasty and became more so the more I ate: creamy and coconutty (unsurprisingly, given the amount of coconut milk in it), with a mild-ish heat that nevertheless was a bit much for mum, and some whole spice seeds to show it was made with real spices, not just flavourings. Best of all were the prawns, frozen king prawns from Tesco’s Finest range, which were plump, chewy in just the right way, and with a good, fresh prawn flavour. I’ll definitely buy those again, at least until I can get down to the village and see if the fishmonger still sells the big bags of them which they did when dad was still alive. Which was best part of ten years ago, so they might not, but it’s worth investigating.

Also from Tesco’s Finest range was this morello cherry tart; I think it was meant to be a Bakewell tart but it’s clearly nothing of the kind³. It was nice enough yesterday, hot with vanilla ice cream, but was even better today, straight from the fridge: the pastry had kept its crunch, and the filling was firmer, and better for it – it was a bit claggy in its warm state. I didn’t then have a couple more chocolate biscuits because mum had left the box out, and then another one because they were going stale and I thought they needed to be disposed of in a safe and humane manner.

So there we are: another day done, with flowers and curry and seemingly never-ending conversations about what day of the week it is, and what day comes next, and what day church is happening. No wonder I’m exhausted by the end of every day, regardless of how well I sleep. Which I hope to be doing again quite soon. I should be back tomorrow with more wittering, and maybe more photos, and almost certainly more dodgy attempts at humour. Goodnight, all.

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1. That story is over on the Facebook group, too. ↩︎
2. Literally so tomorrow: I don’t want to waste the leftover sauce so will have the rest in a mug tomorrow. I haven’t had soup as much as I would like since coming home as mum doesn’t care for it, so that’s something to look forward to. ↩︎
3. Sadly, as I do love a proper Bakewell tart: it’s high on my list of things I want to bake very soon. ↩︎