Ingredients:

1 pound medium shrimp, peeled and deveined
½ cup light sour cream
¼ cup finely chopped onion
2 tablespoons drained chopped pimiento
1 tablespoon prepared horseradish
¼ teaspoon black pepper
2 cups lightly packed thinly sliced romaine lettuce
Lemon wedges

Directions:

Bring large pot of water to boil. Add shrimp and cook, stirring once or twice, just until opaque in center, about 3 minutes. Drain in colander, then rinse under cold running water. Drain again. Pat dry with paper towels.

To make horseradish sauce, whisk together sour cream, onion, pimiento, horseradish, and pepper in small bowl.

Pile ½ cup of lettuce on each of 4 plates. Divide shrimp evenly among plates and top each serving with ¼ cup of sauce. Serve with lemon wedges.

To devein shrimp, cut a shallow slit along the back of each peeled shrimp with a small sharp knife and remove the dark vein. Rinse the shrimp briefly under cold running water and pat dry with paper towels.

Ingredients:

1 tablespoon olive oil
4 garlic cloves, minced
24 large shrimp (about 1 pound), peeled and deveined
¾ teaspoon dried oregano
1/8 teaspoon red pepper flakes

Directions:

Heat oil in very large nonstick skillet over medium heat. Add garlic and cook, stirring, until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Increase heat to medium-high; add shrimp and sprinkle with oregano and pepper flakes. Cook, stirring, until shrimp are just opaque throughout, about 2 minutes. Serve hot or warm.

This is the balti version of king prawn curry. This style of cooking comes from Northern Pakistan and could be described as a wedding between the traditional and the modern restaurant. It is served with with a delicious, lightly spiced mild to medium sauce and comes to your table sizzling hot in a balti serving dish.

A delicately spiced dish which is stir fried and garnished with fried capsicum (peppers), onion and freshly chopped coriander leaves. This recipe is much the same as for chicken bhoona, the only difference is the main ingredient.

This king prawn fairly hot dish is another popular item in the Indian restaurant. This dish has its origins in Goa and the red wine gives it a wonderful unmistakable rich taste.

A fairly hot, spicy king prawn dish with a distinctive combination of spices simmered in a sweet and sour sauce. This is one of the more popular prawn dishes in the Indian restaurant.

A medium curry with king prawn as the main ingredient and served with a delicious, lightly spiced mild to medium, sauce garnished with freshly chopped coriander leaves.

In Fukien, this dish is made from fresh winter bamboo shoots, but in the West we have to be content with the canned product, which, fortunately, retains much of its characteristic crispness.

In many Chinese households, rice, the staple food, used to be cooked in a large, round copper pot. When there was a layer of cooked rice stuck to the bottom of the pot, it would be carefully removed, roasted over a slow fire and then used again. These roasted rice pieces, called guoba, led to the invention of sizzling rice dishes in Eastern regional cuisine. This dish is also called “Thunder bolt out of the blue,” because of the sizzle caused by the boiling sauce when poured on the crispy guoba.

Duck stuffed with glutinous rice is popular with most Chinese, irrespective of the region they come from. The stuffing can be made a day in advance and refrigerated, but if it is, bring it out so that it will be at room temperature before being stuffed into the duck.

The dragon and phoenix of the title are metaphors for the two main ingredients: chicken and prawns. Because it is a very elegant dish, it is worth the trouble to use the “going through the oil” technique to seal in the juices of the ingredients before stir-frying them.

The Cantonese like to bite into prawns that are “crisply firm,” and to achieve this texture Cantonese chefs leave out ginger and wine when preparing them, as we have here.

This dish, with its subtly spicy flavor, is very popular in Hong Kong, one of the leading capitals of Chinese food. The prawns are left with their shells on because this protects the meat from the intense heat of deep-frying, thereby making it succulent when cooked.

This economical and healthy everyday dish is easy to make. It is as popular in Canton as in Shanghai, but the Cantonese use scallions, ginger and shrimp to heighten the flavor; in Shanghai they prefer just dried shrimp.

Shrimp paste has a strong, almost unpleasant, odor, and squid is very bland. However, when stir-fried together, with garlic, this peasant dish, although an acquired taste, can delight even the most sophisticated palate.

I first tasted this dish in 1980 in one of the famous restaurants of my hometown, Hong Kong, and thought it tasted heavenly. There was no question of their letting me into their cookery secret, so I experimented and came up with this concoction. I think you will enjoy it, too.

A Cantonese fire pot reflects what’s easily available in the region, and it therefore consists of seafood as well as meat and vegetables. If you don’t have a traditional charcoal-burning fire pot for cooking at the table, use a fondue set or heatproof bowl and burner or an electric pot.

This salad chapter would not be complete without a salad with hearts of palm—one of my favorite foods. Hearts of palm grow mostly in Brazil and Costa Rica, but can also be found in Florida, where they have the far less appealing name of swamp cabbage. Outside of the tropics, they are usually sold in jars or cans. Each pale green stalk is 1/2 to 1 inch in diameter and resembles a cheese stick. They taste like a cross between artichoke hearts and asparagus, with a slightly crunchy, delicate texture. The tropical ingredients in this salad—avocado, macadamia nuts, and lime marinade for the shrimp—complement the hearts of palm well.

This one is thick and hearty, filled with chunks of pumpkin, shrimp, and cubes of potatoes. The unusual taste comes from the pumpkin base and seafood stock. Putting these two ingredients together is kind of like a mixed marriage between sweet pumpkin and astringent stock, but it works. It gives you a new way to prepare pumpkin instead of pie.

This recipe calls for a long list of ingredients, but its fragrance is worth all of the shopping and prepping. Curry powder makes the broth a golden hue, while the ginger, coriander, and cayenne pepper deepen the flavor. The shrimp absorb all of these spices, adding a burst of flavor to each bite. The addition of coconut, ginger, and okra makes it feel as though you have just traveled to some exotic spot to enjoy a steaming bowl of bliss. Each spoonful is like a mini adventure, even when you never leave your kitchen chair.