Garlic prawns with lardo, roast tomatoes, and feta

I had a bunch of prawns left over from Friday night because I made prawn saganaki (not a japanese dish by the way) and didn't use them all. I was going to post that recipe but somehow I made what should have been a simple dish, super complicated by introducing a whole load of new steps. As I'm not too good at writing things down, it probably would have ended in disaster for anyone who tried to follow my "throw in a bit of this, cook it till it looks ready" instructions. Plus all the photos turned out badly, and there's nothing worse than a food blog with crappy photos; "hey check out this disgusting looking thing I made! You want the recipe?" I may be a bit shallow, but to me that's a bit like looking at "Readers' Wives". 


So anyway, I had about 15 prawns left and Poppy was hungry mid afternoon on Saturday. I started to make gambas al ajillo, which is really simple, but as  I am a man of pork (unfortunately not the John Holmes kind) I decided to add some lardo. lardo is salty cured pork fat and the stuff that I get from the Santa Caterina market is the creamy Iberico belly kind.  If you get it sliced thin enough, use it to blanket hot, garlic-rubbed toast and it melts down like butter. 

Then as I began to pull stuff out of the fridge, I found a few other ingredients to add, and so the dish ended up looking a little more like this. Poppy and I both agreed that as a dining experience, it was quite like smoking crack*.


Recipe


12-16 shelled green prawns
5 cloves of garlic, peeled and  thickly sliced
a slice of lardo or a couple of thin slices of pancetta, finely chopped
a handful of slow roasted tomatoes, chopped (you can substitute with the sun-dried variety)
a sprig of rosemary
a handful of chopped flat leaf parsley
80g feta cheese


Preheat the oven to 240c or as high as that little baby will go.


Pour 50ml of olive oil into a heavy bottomed saucepan over a medium heat. Put the lardo and rosemary in the pan and simmer slowly until the lardo starts to melt away. 

Throw in the garlic, and cook nice and easy. You don't want the garlic to brown, you want it to go translucent and soft, this is important. Now add the tomato and warm it all through. You can remove the rosemary at this stage if you want, it's only there to add a subtle perfume. I did not.

Toss in the prawns  and immediately turn to coat in the oil. Crumble the feta all over the top and put straight into the smoking hot oven. Cook for 5 to 8 minutes, or until the feta is golden brown and melting into the oil. Be careful not to cook the prawns for too long or they will go tough and rubbery. 

Sprinkle the flat leaf parsley and squeeze some lemon juice over the top and serve immediately. Make sure you have fresh crusty bread to mop up all the sticky stuff at the bottom on the pan. 

Poppy had to really struggle with herself to share some with our daughter. I on the other hand was very generous.

This is Poppy mopping up the tangy garlic oil. By the end of it, she was actually displaying some common behaviours of a crack fiend. She now rocks dookie braids.

* Poppy and I have never smoked crack, but we imagine that it is the drug equivalent of this dish.