Jhinga Rangrez

Jhinga Rangrez (The Dyer’s prawns) is a spicy starter dish that I created on Saturday, 4 August 2012.

It was a weekend, but it was also the month of Ramadan and peak summer time, I hadn’t much options to venture out, so was mostly at home during the day. With three broken AC’s in the house and a Sudanese Agent whose favourite line is “I repair, Inshallah tomorrow” my life was limited to the Loo, Beth’s Kitchen and the Study/Dining Room, which I turned into a studio apartment by shifting in single mattresses from the kids room.

My wife and kids had been away on a vacation for almost a month now and I had turned into that self-sufficient forced bachelor who could cook his own food and mix his own drink. The day before I had got home a packet of frozen prawns and intended to do something with it, but didn’t know what. I wasn’t able to decide what to go with, whether it should be the traditional Spicy Kerala Konju Dry Fry or the Prawns Koliwada? To help decide, I went on and read through many online cookery blogs and finally decided to go for Prawns Koliwada.

Although I had picked the frozen prawns’ packet with the tag ‘Cleaned and Deveined’ these prawns were not actually deveined. While I was going about with the arduous task of deveining each prawn, I noticed some small bottles that my wife had left next to the spices rack. I got an idea, and concocted this dish.

Here’s how I did it.

The Recipe

Serves One

Preparation time:

Thawing the frozen prawns – 20mins

Deveining the prawns (which, as per the packet are already deveined) – An eon!

Cutting/chopping, making the marinade - 10mins

Marinating time – 30mins

Mixing the batter – 5mins

Waiting – 10mins

Frying – 5mins

Ingredients:

Prawns – 150gms

Onion – 1no

Ginger chopped – 2tsp

Garlic chopped – 2tsp

Green chillies – 5nos

Lemon juice (bottled) – 3tsp

Corn Flour – 3tbsp

Cumin powder – 1½tsp

Ground Black Pepper – 1½tsp

Food Colours – Blue, Green & Red – ¼tsp each

Oil – sufficient for deep frying

Salt

How I cut them:

I chopped the ginger, garlic and 2/5 chillies finely which went into the marinade.

I cut the onion into rings slicing them staring from the stem to the root. I used the onions for garnishing.

How I cooked it:

The Marinade

I mixed the ginger, garlic, chillies and pounded them lightly in a traditional Indian stone pounder. Later, I moved the wet masala into a mixing bowl and mixed them with prawns and lemon juice ensuring that the juices from the masala coated the prawns well. I then covered the bowl with a plastic wrap and left it in the fridge for 30 minutes.

After 30 minutes I took them out and made three equal portions.

The batter

In three small bowls I added the following:

·         Corn Flour – 1tbsp

·         Cumin powder –½tsp

·         Ground Black Pepper – ½tsp

I mixed them well and added the shrimps into the dry mix. I stopped mixing when I saw that the flour had coated the prawns well.

I did not add any water the mix.

The twist

In the three bowls I added ¼tsp of a separate colour and mixed it with a spoon.

And finally

In a Skillet I heated oil enough, to deep fry the prawns. When the oil was really hot, I fried the prawns and took them out on a plate lined with tissue.

I fried the remaining 3 chillies for garnishing.

After the tissue had soaked up all the unwanted oil, I placed the prawns in three sectors over a layer of loosely thrown onion rings and separated the sectors with fried chillies.  

The experience:

Crackling, yet soft and spicy! It went well with my large peg of Glenfiddich. If only I had made more, I’d have had a couple of drinks extra.

As expected, the colouring did WOW me because I’d never before seen fried prawns in any colour other than red.

Since red, blue and green are the basic colours, there’s no limit on how many different colours that one could make out of them. Actually, the food and health expert in the house and the owner of our kitchen, my wife does not advocate using food colours, nevertheless I tried. The ones that we have now were brought to make safe coloured clay for my kids using flour. Little did I know that it would end up like this?

Since the basic marinade was the same for all the three coloured prawns, they tasted the same. Colouring them differently did not alter their taste. However it did affect the presentation hugely.

I am planning to make more of them to wow my friends when I invite them on my next drinks party. And while I do that, I am planning to use at least over a kilo of prawns, more colours and am planning to mix them up in a bowl and present them just like m&m’s.

Why don’t you try it first and let me know how it comes out?