Sunday, March 26, 2006

Speedy shrimp

The brief for IMBB24 was to cook a meal from scratch in 30 min and as this is my first IMBB I thought it would be appropriate to use the crustacean this blog is named after. So I decided to make Amai Udon from the Wagamama cookbook as they pride themselves on their quick and easy recipes. I’ve always thought they looked quite convoluted when I opened the book and haven’t really cooked from it that much yet. So after a busy day planting vegetables in the garden, I decided to put it to the test. It was a lot easier than I’d expected. Even though you had to make a separate sauce it only takes about 2 min to dissolve the sugar for the sauce in which time you can prepare all the other ingredients. We also used fresh noodles, which made it a lot easier as they only needed to be boiled for a few minutes and the whole meal was done in no time. There was still 7 min 18 sec left on the timer….so plenty of time to make dessert! The noodles tasted very nice and I liked the creamy texture the egg gave to the sweet, salty sauce. I did find the taste a bit too strong next to the subtle tastes of the shrimp and tofu so in the future I would add less of the Amai sauce to the mixture.

Amai Udon (serves 2)
400g (14oz) Udon noodles
2 eggs, beaten
75 ml Amai sauce (3fl oz; I personally would add less)
1 large leek, finely sliced
6 cooked peeled prawns
large handful of beansprouts
2 tbsp vegetable oil
110g (4oz) firm tofu, cut into 10 cubes
juice of 1 lime
2 tbsp chopped roasted peanuts

cook the noodles in a large pan of boiling water for 2-3 minutes until just tender, drain, refresh under cool running water and reserve. Mix egg, Amai sauce with leeks, prawns, beansprouts and noodles in a bowl and stir together. Heat a wok over medium heat, then when slightly smoking , add the oil and fry the tofu till browning slightly. Tip the contents of the bowl into the wok and stir fry for 3-4 min till the egg is cooked and the leek has softened. Divide between two bowls, sprinkle with lime juice and chopped peanuts

Amai sauce (makes 125ml/4fl oz)
1 tbsp malt vinegar
3 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp light soy sauce
1 tbsp dark soy sauce
pinch of salt
1.5 tbsp tomato ketchup
2 tsp tamarind paste

Gently heat vinegar, sugar and soy until the sugar has dissolved, then add the other ingredients and set aside.

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the recipe. This is my favourite dish in Wagamama (admitedly I like it so much I tend to be boring and stick to it rather than sample any other dishes!) I'm looking forward to to trying this out, but I don't currently have any tofu handy. (I always buy it with good intentions, but then it stays in the fridge until it's too late:))

Anonymous said...

Thanks for posting this recipe, worked a treat. It is my favourite dish in Wagamama's too, so I was really glad to see it here and give it a go! Only thing I'd recommend is roughly chopping a red onion and frying it with the tofu, adds a nice texture. They use it in my local and it's great.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for posting the recipe - looks like there's a small horde of us Amai Udon fans!