This is my adaptation of a recipe I found in The Food & Cooking of India by Mridula Baljekar.

Ingredients

For four servings

Preparation

1. Wash the rice and leave to soak.
2. Fry the cinnamon, cloves and leaf in oil until warm. Don't burn.
3. Add the onions and cardamom seed and fry until the onions are translucent.
4. Add the ginger and chili and fry a little longer.
5. Add drained rice, turmeric, salt and coriander. Stir fry on low heat for a couple of minutes, then add water. Bring to the boil, stirring until the level of the water has dropped to the level of the rice.
6. Put the prawns on top of the rice. Cover, lower to minimum heat for one minute, then turn off heat.
7. After 20 minutes, stir prawns in to rice. Garnish with chopped coriander leaf. Serve.

Discussion

This is the first recipe I have cooked from this book. There are some interesting aspects, some of which appear to permeate all her recipes:

• Rice is always left to soak after washing. I don't see the advantage, but I did it anyway.
• I don't understand some of the ingredients. The original called for bay leaf, which I didn't think was used in Indian cuisine. The introduction to the book doesn't help. It mentions bay leaves, but not what she means. I chose Indonesian daun salam, but further research suggests that the correct leaves are probably cinnamon leaves, tej patta or similar; this page gives two different spellings in one section:

  Teja Patta (indian Bay Leaves)

  Teja Pata, or Indian Bay leaves are not the same as the Laural Bay or Sweet Bay used in the west. Nor is it is also not the same as the Balinese Bay leaf (Daun Salam) or the West Indian Bay Leaf. Don’t substitute with a Laurel Bay leaf, even if the recipe says to do so. There is no similarity between the two. The best thing to do if you don’t have Teja Pata is to leave it out altogether, or add a little cassia, cinnamon or an extra clove instead.

• The recipe calls for cooked prawns to be stirred into the rice at the beginning of cooking. That almost certainly ensures that they're overcooked and tough. Putting them on top of the rice seems to be a reasonable compromise.
• In this cookbook, ginger is puréed, apparently from jars. The idea of finely dividing the ginger is doubtless good, but I prefer fresh ginger. Strangely, she never purées the onion.