a little bit of everything...

القاهرة، مصر (CNN)

توفي الفنان المصري الكبير فؤاد المهندس السبت، عن عمر يناهز 82 عاماً، بعد أن ترك تراثاً كبيراً من الأعمال الفنية في المسرح والسينما والتليفزيون والإذاعة، على مدى أكثر من نصف قرن ... التفاصيل
http://arabic.cnn.com/2006/entertainment/9/16/almouhandes.dith/index.html

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tuesday's recipe will be by Nigella Lawson whom I think set new standards for cooking, or did she just follow her instinct? she has a unique outlook on cooking, her role and the audience. The following is a juicy quote from a one of her books to give you a better idea of her philosophy.

"...Cooking is not about just joining the dots, following one recipe
slavishly and then moving on to the next. It's about developing an understanding
of food, a sense of assurance in the kitchen, about the simple desire to make
yourself something to eat. And in cooking, as in writing, you must please
yourself to please others. Strangely it can take enormous confidence to trust
your own palate, follow your own instincts. Without habit, which itself is just
trial and error, this can be harder than following the most elaborate of
recipes. But it's what works, what's important."

This is the recipe I picked and I hope I will be making today..

PRAWN AND BLACK RICE SALAD WITH VIETNAMESE DRESSING

Ingredients:
For the Vietnamese dipping sauce/ dressing

2 cloves garlic, minced or crushed
2 fresh Thai birdeye chillies or other red chillies, finely sliced
approx. 4cm fresh ginger, finely minced
4 tablespoons fish sauce
2 tablespoons lime juice (about 1 lime)
4 tablespoons water
2 tablespoons caster sugar

for the salad
250g Nanking black rice
500g raw, peeled prawns
salt
juice of half a lemon

Instructions:
To make the sauce, simply mix all the ingredients together. It doesn?t get much less complicated than that, frankly.Well, there is the small matter of the rice and prawns. The rice you just cook by following the instructions on the packet; the prawns you poach in some simmering salted water, to which you?ve added the juice of half a lemon, for 5 minutes or so or until just cooked through but still very tender. Let both rice and prawns cool, then give the sauce a quick stir and spoon some over the rice, fork this through and then tumble the prawns on top, spooning a little more sauce over as you go.


* The black rice is real black rice, not wild rice and not white rice dyed black with squid ink. (if you can't find it you can settle for wild rice)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

and finely... Quote of the day..

"Ability may get you to the top, but it takes character to keep you there."

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------