It’s going to be the Year of the Rooster in 2 more days,and as food is the main way to celebrate Chinese New Year, we tried out the Emmy-nominated TV chef Ching He Huang‘s tiger prawns, sweetcorn and chilli recipe. It’s a classic stirfry dish – very quick to prepare and cook – and really adds colour to the dinner table! In Ching’s words, “Prawns symbolise happiness as they are homonym for ‘laughter’ and their reddish colour is synonymous with ‘luck’. The yellow colour of the corn resembles small nuggets of gold symbolizing ‘wealth’.”

The prep time is only 5 minutes, as is the cooking time. It’s Ching’s ethos to use fresh ingredients, but all the fresh tiger prawns were sold out (probably in the scramble to buy prawns for Chinese New Year), and we had some leftover frozen sweetcorn left, so we’re cooking these from frozen, using 100g in total. You’d ideally need to defrost these before use, but when stirfrying, the ingredients such as sweetcorn can be added to the wok frozen – just add an extra minute to the cooking time. We used peanut oil, and premixed the soy sauce, rice vinegar and chilli oil to make it easier to add in one go while stirfrying.

Ingredients
2 tbsps of groundnut oil (e.g. peanut oil)
1 inch piece of fresh root ginger, peeled and grated
200g Large Tiger Prawns, shell on, head and tail on, deveined, cleaned, rinsed in cold water
3 tbsps of Shaosing rice wine or dry sherry
2 small Fresno chillies, deseeded and finely chopped
100g of sweetcorn kernels
2 tbsps of low sodium light soy sauce
1 tbsp of clear rice vinegar
1 dash of chilli oil
1 tbsp of toasted sesame oil
1 large spring onion, finely sliced (optional)

Step 1: Heat a wok over high heat until smoking and add the groundnut oil. Swirl the oil in the wok and add the ginger and very quickly stir for a few seconds.

Step 2: Then add in the prawns.Cook the prawns for 1 minute tossing them in the wok then add in the Shaosing rice wine and try to catch the flame by tilting the wok near the flames of the gas burner (be careful when doing this).

Step 3: Add in the chilli and the Sweetcorn kernels, cooking, tossing and stirring for 1 minute.

Step 4: Then add the low sodium light soy sauce, clear rice vinegar, chilli oil and the toasted sesame oil cooking for another minute until all the shells of the prawns have turned pink and are cooked through and the Sweetcorn kernels have softened.

Step 5: Give it a final stir and then transfer to a serving dish. Garnish with sliced spring onions and serve with brown or Jasmine rice.

This is just one of Ching’s recipes to celebrate Chinese New Year. Her recipes are influenced by her heritage from Southern Taiwan, and she has made them modern, healthy and tasty.

If you’re in London and you want to try Ching’s recipes without cooking yourself, Ting at Shangri-La, the Shard is running a special menu by Ching until Friday 5th Feb, 2017 to celebrate Chinese New Year. Enjoy good food with amazing views – we got a sneak peak at the launch of the special menu, and braised mushroom, bamboo shoots, broccoli stem Dan Dan ‘Zha’ Mein was especially delicious. You can see more on our Instagram!