Tasty Tapas: Gambas Prawns

After cooking some lovely tapas dishes for friends, I realised two very big plus points to tapas. The first, is that you can do an awful lot in terms of preparation before everyone arrives (in fact, most dishes can be reheated). And you can cater for anyone's tastes. One of my friend's has a shellfish allergy, which would usually meaning avoiding tasty prawns altogether and cooking something else. As long as you're careful not to use the same pans for stirring, you can cater for meat lovers, vegetarians and fish-phobes all at once. Although you do tend to use every single pan in the house which means more washing up.

If you can rope someone into doing the dishes and fancy adding a few more tapas dishes to your repertoire, here's a lovely gambas prawn recipe which is very tasty indeed:

You'll need these things:

• 500g prawns
• Juice of 1 lemon
• 1 red chilli
• 1tsp paprika
• 1/2 red onion finely diced
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic

You'll need to do these things:

Add everything apart from the prawns into a shallow pan. Stir until the garlic and onions are heated through, but not burning. Then add the prawns. Toss for a few minutes, then reduce the heat and cook for another minute or so and then they should be 'gambassing' nicely (yes, I made that word up). If you're using uncooked prawns, make sure you change the cooking times accordingly. You can use the great big tiger prawns in the shells if you don't mind the peeling (I do). When you taste them, the lemon and chili should cut right through the taste of the prawns. Yummy!

Flickr image from Jen SFO BCN's photostream.