Prawn and Chive Linguine

I've been cooking this prawn and chive linguine for years, with a bit of a lull last year when the price of prawns galled me. It's okay though! Now the price of everything galls me, so prawns are back on the menu.

You might like it because: it's fairly quick to cook, there's not much to go wrong, it's a little more interesting than Chicken Dish #37.

Ingredients

• cooking oil
• a fistful of linguine per person
• 2 garlic cloves, finely sliced
• 100ml white wine, only my measuring jug starts at 200ml so I'm never that accurate
• 4 tbsp crème fraîche
• juice of 1 lemon
• a load of chives, thinly sliced — I always go overboard initially as my chive are t h r i v i n g and throw whatever I don't use back in the compost heap
• a pack of peeled prawns, 150g minimum for two people, ideally raw but Tesco is forever substituting the cooked kind and they seem to work. I prefer to cut each prawn into two or three pieces, ymmv
• 1 red chili pepper, sliced as finely as you can be bothered to slice it

Additions: Garlic bread as a side. Parmesan and black pepper on top.

This is actually a removal, but uh, I modified this from the original recipe to make it creamy. If you don't like cream (or have a dairy allergy) just axe the crème fraîche to revert to the original recipe.

Method

1. Start the linguine (and garlic bread) cooking on the hob and in the oven respectively with an eight-minute check-in timer set to keep them safe. Heat the oil in your frying pan and fry up all your garlic and chili pepper.
   ↓ 2 minutes
2. Add all the wine and bubble that over high heat.
   ↓ 1 minute
3. Turn the heat down to medium and stir in all the crème fraîche. Your sauce will look atrocious at this stage, but stir until it's smooth. Keep cooking until you've got your desired consistency — better to cook for longer now to thicken your sauce than once the prawns are in there, as they'll go rubbery if you heat them too long.
    
4. Add all the prawns.
   ↓ 2 minutes if your prawns are pre-cooked, 4 minutes or until they turn pink if your prawns arrived raw
5. Drain the linguine and add all of it to the saucepan, along with 75% of the chives. Use tongs to mix everything together, then serve into bowls and top with all the remaining chives. If your garlic bread is still in the oven, rescue it now.

Gallery

Dates cooked

25/06/2023

Meals with shared short-life ingredients

These are recipes that neatly use up leftover ingredients that would otherwise go off. I tend to cook these together in the same week after a grocery order.

Leftover	Meal
Crème fraîche	Bacon, Pesto and Leek Puffs Fish Pie Broccoli and Pine Nut Gnocchi

For longer-life ingredients, check out this list of recipes grouped by unusual ingredient.