Ashleigh´s Coconut Fish Curry Recipe
I absolutely love food and for me there’s nothing more satisfying than cooking a delicious meal for friends, family, and sometimes even guests at Rocacorba Cycling. Seeing people’s expressions as they tuck into a delicious meal brings me joy.
For me one of the things I enjoy most about cooking, is experimenting with flavours from different parts of the world. At the moment I’m really enjoying Indian and Thai flavours, and during the Coronavirus lockdown I’ve had more time than usual to experiment with new combinations.
I would like to share with you my recipe for my favourite dish at the moment; it is a colourful hake and prawn one-pot infused with a combination of Indian and Thai inspired flavours. The great thing about this dish is that it is super quick and easy to make, and is absolutely bursting with flavour.
Prep Time: 15 mins
Cook Time: 15 mins
Serves 4… or in the case of Carl and I, maybe only 2 ;-)
INGREDIENTS:
1 tbsp olive oil
1 onion, finely chopped
thumb-sized piece of ginger, finely grated
3 garlic cloves, crushed
1 anchovy fillet, finely chopped and mashed
1 small red chilli, shredded (deseeded if you don’t like it too hot)
rind of 1 lemon, finely grated
1 heaped tbsp medium curry powder
1 heaped tbsp muscovado sugar (or any brown sugar will do)
small bunch coriander, stems finely chopped
400g can coconut milk
450g skinless hake fillets, cut into generous rectangles
220g pack frozen raw whole prawns
1 lime, halved
cooked rice, to serve
METHOD
Heat the oil in a crockpot or lidded frying pan, then soften the onion for 5mins. Stir in the ginger, garlic, anchovy, chilli, and lemon rind, and cook for 2mins. Add the curry powder and sugar, and keep stirring. When the sugar starts to melt, add the coriander stems, coconut milk and a little water, then bring to a simmer.
Add the fish and prawns to the sauce, then squeeze over half the lime. Pop on the lid and simmer for about 5 mins or until the hake is just cooked and flaking, and the prawns are pink through. Taste for seasoning and add the remainder of the lime juice if you like. Scatter over the coriander leaves and serve with rice.
Finding Peace and My Place in Lockdown
So, life has changed. If you’re a human on the planet, you’ve been affected by Coronavirus. For us at Rocacorba Cycling in Spain, that has meant full lockdown. It happened with very little notice and, with the exception of groceries, medical care, or walking a pet, we are confined to our homes.
The notice of our lockdown came fast. In about 48 hours we went from rumours to “effective immediately” and with that came a lot of fear and questions. As the gravity of reality sank in, so did my fear about the future. In the big picture of life, sport is not an essential good. Everyone is vulnerable—physically, mentally, and economically—and in such unprecedented times, I was struggling to find peace and place in the global pandemic.
The biggest obvious challenge for me was shifting all my training indoors. I’ve always rather put on a jacket and trained outside, rain or snow, so, I’ll be honest, I wasn’t looking forward to being stuck inside. But, whether injury, illness, the racing calendar, team decisions, training, family, work, or whatever, the best athletes are the ones that can adapt, period. Ready or not, I had to rise to this scary and extraordinary challenge.
Rocacorba Cycling has always had a top-of-the-line indoor training set up thanks to our friends at Zwift. With a Tacx smart trainer and Zwift, I knew I had the best possible tools for success. Still, I wasn’t sure how I was going to keep it together mentally. A week was one thing. I was confident I could handle three even four weeks but what if it was longer? What about the Olympics? CCC-Liv?
I just started out riding around Wattopia (one of the Zwift virtual worlds). Pretty quickly, I started to discover all the people; I began joining group rides and eventually started hosting meet-ups of my own. I rode with guests who were supposed to be staying with us, friends from across the planet who I never get to ride with, and I’ve even joined the London Dynamos for what’s become a regular Saturday morning ¨race¨. A whole new world of indoor training opened up to me and with real people behind every avatar, there was real engagement, real fun, and even real DOMS. I have a meet-up almost every day now and, unexpectedly, it’s actually allowed me to be more social than ever.
It took a while but I began to make peace with the situation. The Olympics weren’t gone, they were just a little bit farther away. The races would come back and I hoped women’s cycling would be able to find more ground in a post-pandemic world. We might not be racing as CCC-Liv but we were still very much a team. We had started meeting twice a week over the internet and that was actually bringing us closer together. The future of cycling was going to be different but CCC-Liv was already building a new, stronger normal and that security and support is just as comforting as it is a source of motivation.
And I had also found my place: the indoor trainer. I felt blessed to be healthy and committed to doing my part and staying home. I was grateful that technology and Zwift allowed me to continue working and more grateful it became a source of motivation that also kept me connected to so many people.
Rising to the challenge of Coronavirus, for me, has meant finding my place and making peace with reality and the unknown. Lockdown, no matter how long it will be, is always going to be hard but doing our part and staying safe from COVID-19 is about physical distance not social isolation. Whether it’s training inside and meeting-up for virtual rides, making a home office or a home gym, or picking up the phone and giving a friend or family member a call, staying together is the best way we can all rise to the challenge, stay healthy, and make it through Coronavirus.