Who wouldn’t want an easy recipe for good fortune, right? While we can’t guarantee that making or eating this dish will add to your financial status, stir-fry leek with prawns is a fine example of how a simple dish cooked quickly can be so full of flavour and goodness at the same time.
Stir-fry leek (as well as other leek-based dishes) are popular during the Chinese New Year period as leek in Chinese sounds like the mandarin word for ‘to calculate’. The Chinese community believes that eating leek during Chinese New Year will bring you good wealth and lots of money to count in the coming year.
So what say you? Shall we have some leek this Chinese New Year?
Ingredients
- 140g (5 pc) prawns
- 100ml cooking oil
- 360g leek
- 14g (1 tbsp) fish sauce
- 14g (1 tbsp) Shao Xing (Chinese cooking) wine
- ¼ tsp salt
- ¼ tsp pepper
Instructions
- First, clean and devein prawns leaving the skin on. This adds significant flavour to your dish.
- Next, remove the root end of your leeks.
- Then, cut leek on the bias (diagonally), about 1cm to 1.5cm thick.
- Soak cut leeks in some water to separate the pieces, then drain.
- Add cooking oil and heat your wok on high heat for about 1 to 2 minutes. You want the wok and oil to get really, really hot.
- Add prawns, salt and pepper and quickly stir fry until prawns are cooked, about 1 minute. Remove prawns and set aside.
- Immediately add leeks and stir-fry for about 2 minutes, stirring continuously. You want the leeks to wilt and cook thoroughly.
- Add Shao Xing wine and cooked prawns once the leek has reached a tenderness you like. Give it a quick stir to mix and turn off the heat.
- Serve immediately while still warm, with the cooked prawns arranged nicely on top.
Extra tips
- The fatter the leeks the better, but this recipe will work just as well with skinny leeks.
- The secret is in the hot wok. It has to be hot. Really, really, really hot.
- You can choose to use skinless prawns, but the skin really flavours the oil.
- That single tablespoonful of Shao Xing wine adds a great depth of flavour to this dish. However, this dish will still be tasty if you opt to have it without.
That’s it! We told you stir-fry leek with prawns is super simple to make. And it’s so good and easy there’s no reason for you not to have it regularly throughout the rest of the year as well. We’d like to thank Jennifer Ker for showing us how to make this delicious dish. Tag your pictures with #butterkicap so we can see how your stir-fry leek with prawns turned out!
