Prawn rice noodle salad

The trouble with cooking for one is that you often end up with piles some special ingredient with a limited shelf-life and having to eat it for days on end.  Kind of like the Christmas turkey, you have to keep looking for different and interesting ways to use ingredients.  Or just eating the same thing over and over again.

This weekend saw me with prawns and rice noodles a-plenty.  And I really wasn't in the mood for them after Friday's lovely Singapore noodle-fest.  But, this challenge is all about looking for different recipes and being a little adventurous, which is why my lunch today is a prawn and rice noodle salad - with mango.

Sweet and meat is kind of like marmite.  You either love it or hate it.  Growing up, whenever it was gammon steak for tea, there was one camp inhabited by my mother and grandfather where pineapple on the side was a crime (they had a fried egg instead) whereas my grandma and I embraced the contrast of salt-pink gristle and oversweet, metallic-tinged pineapple rings alongside lashings of cauliflower cheese (heaven) and oven chips (god how I hate those things).

Please excuse the tidemark round the box...

But sweet and seafood is an entirely new thing for me.  The ingredient seems very pan-Asian but seeing as how the furthest East I've been is Turkey (the place, not the bird) I couldn't say if it's anywhere near authentic.  But I had all the ingredients to hand and it sounded portable so game on.

It's different.  I adored the dressing, but still not sure about the salad as a whole.  Probably a 'grower'.  I'm not saying I wouldn't eat it again, but I wouldn't go out of my way to make it in my current lifetime.  I don't know anyone else who would eat it if I cooked it.  I know people who would eat bits of it (my mother the prawns but she'd hate the mango and peanut butter, the child would eat the mango) but unless I am ever faced with visitors with distinguished tastes, the next time I eat this will be when I throw caution to the wind in my late fifties, take a gap year and backpack round the far East.  Like I said - not again in my current lifetime.

And please excuse the tidemark around the box in the picture...trying to save on the washing up, I mixed it in the box - lazy or good for the environment????