Culinary Comeback with Shōrsē Diye Chingri Maachh

You can take a fish out of water, but you cannot take the fish out of a Bengali. Even though that Bengali is pregnant and claims she has aversions for anything non-vegetarian.

After being sufficiently mocked and made fun of for continuing on my no-meat, no-fish hiatus, and being treated as a social pariah, I thought of a culinary comeback.

The urge was there. The ingredients too. Just under 30 minutes, I was eating a lunch today with a work-from-home husband. A meal we will remember for a long, long time. Hope my grape-size baby will too.
Ingredients for Shōrsē Diye Chingri Maachh (Shrimps in Mustard Sauce) are:

500 grams tiger shrimp or prawns of your choice, shell and tail on, deveined
2 tablespoons plain yogurt
Two and a half tablespoons yellow mustard seeds
1 heaped tablespoon poppy / posto seeds
Half teaspoon turmeric powder
4-5 green chilies (I used about six!)
2-3 tablespoons mustard oil (No other cooking oil will work. Trust me.)
Salt

Wash and clean the shrimps. In a grinder, make a course powder of the mustard and poppy seeds. Since the quantity is little, its best to do a dry powder first and then add half the quantity of the green chilies and wet grind with a little water. You can also add a little salt and the turmeric powder to this mixture.

Now add the mustard-poppy seed mixture to the shrimps along with the yogurt and slit green chilies. Add salt (if needed) and drizzle the mustard oil all over the shrimp. Mix well.

You can either steam this or cook this in the microwave for 10 minutes. Of course covered all the time.

If you have a pressure cooker, put the shrimps and its sauce in a steel tiffin box, pour a little water at the base of the cooker and cook this till a whistle goes off.

Else, you can put it in a microwaveable bowl, cover and cook for 10 minutes.

There are no two ways of eating the Shōrsē Diye Chingri Maachh. It has to be eaten with steaming hot rice and yes, we did eat with our hands today.