apparently Thursday is the new Friday

Well, I didn't get to sample the apple & mint jelly - I'd forgotten it was Thursday night, and Thursday night is (occasionally) pub quiz night. So I had to knock up something quick for dinner, and I came up with this:

Dave's Prawn Laksa

You will need (these quantities are for 1 person, i.e. me. Multiply them up as required. I haven't put quantities for some of them as I assume it's obvious, i.e. as much or as little as you want, within reason. Don't come complaining to me if you put a pint of lime juice in and it ends up tasting horrible.):

• Prawns (I had a 220g packet of jumbo king prawns, which was more than enough for me)
• Coconut milk - about half a tin. Shake up up before opening it, otherwise you get half a tin of really thick coconut goo and half a tin of water.
• Garlic
• Red Chillies
• Ginger
• Lemon grass (mine comes out of a jar)
• Fresh coriander (ideally. Mine came out of a jar last night, though)
• Laksa paste. Reuben Solomon's Singapore Laksa paste is the one I use, and it's great. Sainsbury's sell it, or at least the one in Bristol does.
• Lime juice
• Fish sauce
• Noodles (I used the big fat wormy udon ones last night, but any old noodles will do. Amoy ones are good.)

Fry up the garlic, chillies, ginger and lemon grass a bit. Bung a couple of big spoonfuls of the paste in and stir it around a bit. Add the coconut milk, lime juice & fish sauce and stir it all around so it's mixed together. Chuck the prawns in, cook for 5 minutes or so, add the noodles, another 2-3 minutes, add the coriander, stir it in. Serve. Eat. Bish, and, indeed, bosh. Total preparation and cooking time: about 15 minutes. And it's delicious. Well, I think so anyway.

Then we went to the pub, specifically the Hop House in Clifton village, which has a music quiz on Thursday nights. Nice pub, one major complaint: they don't have enough beer! They do a very delicious pint of Wadworth's 6X, but I don't think I've ever been there when they haven't run out of it at some point during the evening. Last night I managed to get in two pints before it ran out and I had to switch to something else. It can't be that difficult, surely? Other pubs seem to manage it OK.

Speaking of drinking something else, we came second in the quiz, and this week all the prizes were drink-based, specifically varying numbers of bottles of Quinn's, a sort of fruity alcopop that Diageo are marketing as "Fruit Made Alcohol", i.e. the alcohol comes from fermenting fruit, and is therefore presumably more "natural" in some way, as if this makes a blind bit of difference. Anyway, second prize was ten bottles of the stuff, and we didn't want to carry it home, or argue about dividing it up, so we drank the lot there and then. My head hurts a bit this morning! Though on the upside I am in no immediate danger of catching scurvy, which is nice.