FoodieChat

Do you love fresh crab meat but can’t be bothered picking it yourself from the shells? Well, hope you’ve got more than spare change because at the fish markets, pre-picked crab meat is $20 for 200g! That’s very expensive compared to DIY-ing. The best crab to get is blue swimmer because it’s the cheapest, easiest to handle and I find that its flesh comes out the easiest.  At $18 a kg, one crab is about 1/3 of a kg, and has enough meat for a generous portion for one – 100g on the one I bought. That’s significantly cheaper!  Here’s how you do it.

Buy the numbers of crab you need (1 per person) – this recipe will be for one.  Then place in a steamer - improvised by using a metal dish on a rack in a wok filled with 5cm deep hot water.  Steam crab for 20 mins.  When cool, peel the bottom shell off, and peel off all the gills and guts. It’s not that bad actually! Then break off the hard top shell, and break the crab in half.  Using a crab picker, a bread knife or your clean fingers, pluck out the meat and into a bowl.

Boil your spaghetti according to the packet instructions. Finely chop 1 clove of garlic, half a small birds eye chilli and some parsley.  Heat up a frypan with a lug of olive oil, and heat up the garlic until softened, but not burnt.  Then add the chilli, and finally, toss through the crab meat and the spaghetti with a bit of the spaghetti water to loosen.  Scatter with parsley and serve.  Crab linguine with chilli garlic and parsley for $6!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 9:36 pm and is filed under Recipes, Seafood. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.