Cocktail salad

I've spent my weekend trying to find a recipe that I felt like doing. Nothing I considered had any particular appeal, until I wandered past the fish counter on a quick supermarket visit, and spotted some prawns.

I've wondered for a while what I was going to do with the cocktail sauce (p185) recipe. The obvious use is in a seafood cocktail, but since there's a separate recipe for that, I felt like it would be too repetitive. On seeing the prawns, however, I suddenly had the idea of using them  - and the cocktail sauce - to make something somewhere between a cocktail and a salad.


The first thing to do was hard-boil an egg (the recipe has two, but I was making a half-mix). When that was cooked and cooled, I mixed up the sauce. It's just a matter of combining ingredients - spiced vinegar, prepared mustard (I used wholegrain, since that's all I happened to have on hand) mayonnaise, oil, the chopped egg, chopped cucumber, parsley and seasoning.

I arranged the prawns on some salad and spooned the cocktail sauce. Ok, so it didn't look that pretty, but it tasted really good. The sauce is tangy and creamy, and it's quite substantial for a sauce, with all those chunky bits of egg and cucumber. If you can think of a use for it, this sauce is worth doing - tasty and easy to make.