Photo: Yuki Sugiura
In recent weeks, food Instagram has been bubbling over with praise for Ella Risbridger’s The Kitchen Book. The likes of Anna Jones, Nigella, Nigel and Jeremy Lee have all been giddy in their enthusiasm. And the book has gone straight into the bestseller lists.
Ella is a warm, funny, self-deprecating presence whose debut, Midnight Chicken (& Other Recipes Worth Living For), in 2019 was the book of the year in multiple publications and won the Guild of Food Writers’ cookbook of the year award. This time around, Ella is focusing on the things she loves. “I love to be in the kitchen and I love to be eating and I love to be cooking and I hate that I have to do it every day, and if I have to do it every day it has to be so much better than just eating toast.” Her prose and her style are just so practical. Take this, for example: “These are the recipes of my life, and I want them – even, like, two of them! – to become the recipes of yours … I will help you fuck around with these recipes until they fit your life so exactly it’s like they were tailored!”
What to choose for this week’s dish? From turmeric satay salmon and greens through banh banh sheet pan chicken to sticky-crispy tofu … In the end, we plumped for this prawn curry.
This is what Ella says about it. “My friend B says the number one thing he seeks in a recipe is knifelessness: no chopping board required, just everything in a pot and leave it alone until it's done.”
She is aiming for “the kind of dinners that feel like a treat after a long day: the kind of dinners that require almost nothing of you, but give you everything back, the kind of dinners that have a kind of alchemy to them; the kind of dinners that are more than the sum of their parts. A good recipe has to be that, I think. It has to feel a little like magic. This one feels like that to me.”
Words by Jane Ferguson
Photographs by Yuki Sugiura
Ella’s no-knife potato and prawn curry
Spices can and must be tweaked to suit delicate palates. Feel free to leave out the chilli altogether, and to swap the garam masala for a sweet garam with less chilli.
Pre-cooked chicken instead of the prawns, plus chicken stock, will also work if you don't have fish stock. Do not try to poach raw chicken in five minutes.
Serves 4
Ingredients
1 tbsp garlic puree (or grated garlic)
1 tbsp ginger puree (or grated ginger)
1 tbsp tomato puree
1 tbsp neutral oil
1 tbsp mild chilli powder
2 tsps turmeric
1 tsp ground cumin
2 tbsps garam masala
500g cherry tomatoes
500g tiny new potatoes
400ml tin coconut milk
1 tbsp mango chutney
1 tbsp fish sauce
1 tsp red wine vinegar
½ coconut milk tin of double-strength fish stock (or one fish stock pot plus 200ml water)
200g baby spinach
160g raw peeled prawns
Rice, to serve (may I introduce you to … the microwave pouch?)Ingredient
Method
You fry spices, pureed garlic and ginger and tomato. You blister a punnet of cherry tomatoes and a little bag of whole, tiny, new potatoes. You pour over coconut milk and add a fish stock cube. You add a dollop of mango chutney, then you walk away until the tomatoes have almost disintegrated into sharp-sweet sauce, and the potatoes have softened into that fudgy-perfect softness that you only get from cooking them in their skins, and soaked up all the umami-depth of the broth. You toss in a bag of spinach, and a thing of prawns, until the spinach is wilted and the prawns blush pink. You take the pan to the table, and serve.
In a big heavy-bottomed pan with a lid, mix together the purees, the oil, the chilli powder, the spices and the garam masala. Cook for 2 mins over a low heat.
Add the tomatoes and cook for another 5 mins, scraping up any stuck bits of puree from the bottom. Add the potatoes, coconut milk, mango chutney, fish sauce and red wine vinegar. Stir the fish stock concentrate into half a coconut-milk can of boiling water (careful of fingers), and add that too. Stir.
Two choices: lid on for a soupier vibe (helpful for colds); or lid off for a thicker, currier vibe, and walk away for 45 mins, taking the lid off after the first 15 mins then leaving for another 30.
Lift the lid off (if on), turn the heat right down, and fold the spinach through in handfuls. It will look like much too much. It isn't! It's the right amount! Handful, wilt, handful, wilt, handful, wilt. When all the spinach is in, add the prawns. The nice thing about cooking prawns is that they go from blue to pink when cooked, like a built-in temperature gauge. It will take 5 mins to do both of these things.
Season generously with salt and pepper. Maybe also chilli flakes? We tend to do this with hot sauce at the table, to accommodate as many palates as possible.
The Kitchen Book by Ella Risbridger is published by 4th Estate, £26