If you’re a three-hours-or-longer-Friday-lunch kinda person, the Chinese work ethic can take a bit of getting used to. It’s no wonder they’re taking over the world one “Made in China” label at a time – they work like machines. So my husband works really long hours. We hardly see each other on a work day and then he only has one in every twelve days off. Needless to say, rain days have become very precious to us, because he gets to stay home. We get so ridiculously lazy on these days. We COULD use them as a precious opportunity to spend some time together exploring all the fascinating new places around us. But when that call finally comes, confirming there will be no pick up that day, we inevitably turn to each other and, slightly embarrassed at our anti-wanderlust tendencies, timidly suggest simultaneously, “Movies?”. We will then proceed to spend the entire day in bed watching movies, only emerging to make tea or something to eat. On one such day, while one of the many typhoons that battered China’s eastern coast this summer was raging outside, I hit a personal low on the uselessness scale. I got up around four in the afternoon, still in my nightie, and looked in the mirror (probably to check for bedsores). The mirror is behind the bedside lamp and the globe is naked because the hotel uses these ridiculously ostentatious lamp shades that are all shade without the lamp bit. They are so covered in gold they don’t let any actual light through so I’d removed it. Anyway, I leaned into the mirror and accidentally burnt my boob on the globe! I pulled my nightie away and was horrified to discover I had burnt a blister right through the fabric! I was also a little confused as, while it had smarted a bit, it didn’t seen to be as sore as a big, brown blister warranted. Nonetheless, it was not lost on me that I could use my injury as a means of getting out of tea making duty for the rest of the day. So I put on my best quivering-lip face and, nursing my injured appendage, made my way to my husband to garner some sympathy. I was just rounding the corner of the bed, wondering whether limping a little would be overkill, when my blister fell off. We stood there staring at it for a few seconds until realization dawned: The blister was nothing more than an errant popcorn kernel, stuck there from wolfing down a bowl from a prone position hours earlier. So it was on this day – trying to make up for being caught at such an obvious deception just to get out of tea making duty – that this dish was conceived. Adam declared it to be one of his favorites. The inspiration came from my mom’s preferred way of doing prawns. The original recipe (from a Vroue Federasie cook book from yore) used lemon juice (and had a few different tweaks I don’t recall) which is an ideal substitute for when you’d rather drink your wine than cook with it. This pasta dish is perfect for days when you are so lazy, that anything you eat needs to take ten minutes or less to cook from start to finish. Maximum impact with ridiculously little effort.

Serves 2

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