
Delicious sweet and spicy flavours, and it’s on the table faster than phoning the local takeaway.
It’s not often you can go from opening the fridge door to having dinner on the table in 20 minutes. However, this sweet chilli prawn stir-fry is one of those recipes. The crunchy vegetables, juicy king prawns, and spicy-sweet chilli sauce make this one of our best and easiest low calorie meals. Even better, apart from the cabbage and carrots, all the ingredients are things you can have easily on hand when hunger strikes. Feel free to add more veggies to fill up your plate with filling, low-fat ingredients.
Ingredients
- Salt and freshly ground black pepper
- 2 carrots, peeled and cut into ribbons
- 60g (2oz) red cabbage, finely shredded
- 125g (4oz) or 2 blocks medium egg noodles
- 1tbsp toasted sesame oil
- 400g pack frozen raw king prawns, defrosted and drained
- 6 spring onions, trimmed and chopped
- 4tbsp Thai sweet chilli sauce
WEIGHT CONVERTER
Method
- Bring 600ml (1 pint) water to the boil in a wok or large pan. Add a pinch of salt, the carrot ribbons and red cabbage, and cook for 2 mins, to blanch them. Rest a colander over a pan, drain the vegetables from the wok into the colander, reserving the water in the pan. Set aside the vegetables.
- Return the water in the pan to the boil. Add the noodles, cook for 4 mins, to soften, then drain and rinse through with cold water.
- Meanwhile, heat the sesame oil in the wok, add the prawns and cook for about 3 mins, until they turn pink all over. Add the white part of the spring onions, the blanched carrot and cabbage, the noodles and the sweet chilli sauce. Stir-fry for a few minutes to warm it all through. Serve in bowls, sprinkled with chopped spring onion tops.
Top tips for making sweet chilli and prawn stir fry
No red cabbage to hand? You can swap it for thinly sliced peppers, green cabbage, Brussels sprouts or courgettes.
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Octavia Lillywhite is an award-winning food and lifestyle journalist with over 15 years of experience. With a passion for creating beautiful, tasty family meals that don’t use hundreds of ingredients or anything you have to source from obscure websites, she’s a champion of local and seasonal foods, using up leftovers and composting, which, she maintains, is probably the most important thing we all can do to protect the environment.