When Cynthia Shanmugalingam is pressed for time, dinner means a quick and delicious prawn curry
this season—while also opening a restaurant with the same name in London. And then she comes home and makes herself dinner—it makes her “feel like an adult.”
But I also had a recipe to write tonight and some laundry and whatever. So anyways, what I cooked today is prawn curry because prawn curry is absurdly quick to cook. Sri Lankans eat a lot of prawns and seafood. Growing up as a kid we had prawn or fish curry maybe four nights a week and then chicken once or twice and then vegetarian maybe the other day and maybe once or twice in a fortnight we would have meat like lamb. But most of the time we had seafood.
In Sri Lanka, we eat prawn curry with bread. We call it White Bloomers in England. It’s a simple loaf of white bread. Not sourdough, not anything with a heavy crumb. Like a pillowy soft white bread. Bread and prawn curry are wonderful together. We would eat it for breakfast actually or for dinner. Dinner and breakfast are kind of the same for us because they’re both small, light meals whereas lunch is supposed to be your proper big meal of the day.