I have nothing…

Well, the other day, I had nothing in the fridge – no vegetables. There were meat and fish in the freezer…but the fridge was as bare as Old Mother Hubbard’s (I bet not many young people today would know her…) cupboard. I couldn’t go out to buy as it was raining heavily…and then I spotted a tupperware of cut pineapples. My missus often buys some to eat while watching tv at night…and suddenly, I knew exactly what I could cook – asam pineapples with prawns!

There was a packet of asam paste for cooking seafood in the freezer. My missus used half of it to cook fish…or prawns once and we thought it wasn’t really nice. Ah well…I was not about to go through the trouble of cutting and pounding all the ingredients, so I decided to use what was left in the packet.

I just fried the paste in the wok, no oil added…and then I threw in some finely chopped Bombay onion and a few stalks of serai (lemon grass) and a while later, the prawns. Once the prawns were cooked, I added the pineapples plus a bit of water to simmer for a while…and some sugar to balance the sourish taste of the asam and the pineapples. Then, it was ready…

To my delight, it turned out very nice…

…except that there was a strong smell of bunga kantan (ginger flower/torch ginger bud) which some people may find repulsive but I was ok with that.

The best part, of course, was that there was no hassle at all – easy to cook, nice to eat! Yum! Yum!!! LOL!!!