I was watching Ching-He Huang's Chinese Food Made Easy on the Beeb the other night. Not intentionally, you understand – watching food TV is an exercise in total masochism at the moment, as far as I'm concerned. But it caught my eye as I was channel flicking because she was discussing Szechuan food, which I love and which we hardly see over here – most of our Chinese restaurant menus are based on Cantonese cooking, and it's only fairly recently that we've started exploring China's regional cuisines. I love Szechuan food for its warmth and spice – I bought a copy of Fuchsia Dunlop's Sichuan Cookery a few years ago, when it first came out, and was entranced by both her writing and the recipes.Anyway, while I thought that Ching-He Huang's programme was slightly dumbed down (a case of 'don't scare the viewers', I suspect), her dish of chilli tiger prawns whet my appetite and made me want to experiment around the dish she'd created. The recipe below is my version of the dish. With the amount of chilli it contains, this is not a dish for the faint-hearted – but it's nowhere near as unmanageable as you might expect.
Szechuan prawns for two
1 tbsp groundnut or vegetable oil
1 small fresh chilli, green or red, thinly sliced
2 cloves of garlic, peeled and thinly sliced
2-3 large, mild dried chillies (I used some Kashmiri chillies)
1 tsp Szechuan pepper
250g raw, shelled tiger prawns (large prawns are better than small prawns for this dish), deveined
4-5 spring onions, cleaned and trimmed, then cut into three large, chunky bits
1 tbsp Shaoxhing cooking wine or Fino/Manzanilla sherry
1 tbsp light soy sauce
150g thin green beans, topped and tailed
juice of 1 lime
a good handful of coriander leaves, chopped
Heat the oil in a wok until it starts smoking, then throw in the chillies, garlic and pepper and stir for about 15 seconds.
Chuck the prawns in and, when they start to turn pink, add the spring onions and cook for another minute. Stir in the cooking wine and soy sauce.
Add the beans and cook for another 2-3 minutes, until the beans start to cook through.
Add the lime juice to taste, stir through, then stir in the coriander leaves.
Remove from the heat and serve (you can have a small helping of brown rice if you want).
