Nilasing na Hipon

This is the recipe for a nilasing na hipon I have come to know. When I was young, my cousin would marinate shrimps with a cup of gin before cooking it ala halabos. He was a drunkard but man, does he ever cook. He also added well about ¼ cup of 7-up (I guess measuring cups were never invented yet then) to it. As a kid, I thought the gin and the 7-up was just because he so dearly loved to drink and he wanted even his food to be with gin.

As I started cooking myself, I have come to realize that wine actually enhanced the taste of your food. Away from the Philippines, our prawns are not live here. (Well, not quite true because you could actually buy them somewhere else but who would like to do that when the sun is out and you have one bag that you recently bought when prawns were on sale?) More so, they are imported either from China, Thailand or the Philippines. What is good is they’re dressed already although I still miss the heads to add flavor to my palabok

We are not regular hard drinkers so when I cooked this, I only had red cooking wine in my cupboard. I also stopped drinking softdrinks so I had to think of something else to sweeten my dish. How about Mirin?

So without much ado, I marinated about 1 lb of deveined,but not shelled prawns in ½ cup of red cooking wine and ½ cup mirin for about 15 minutes. It might have been longer.

In the meantime, I prepared the following:

2 tbsp of olive oil
5 cloves of garlic finely chopped
about ½ inch of ginger, finely chopped
½ onions, finely chopped
¼ cup of finely sliced green onions
salt to taste

And here's the suggested method of cooking this dish.

In a pan, heat oil and sauté the garlic, ginger and onions for about 2 minutes or until the garlic turns light brown. Drain the prawns and add to the sautéed garlic, ginger and onions. Cook until prawns turn red or cooked. Season with salt. Turn stove off and add the green onions in. It's that simple.