This weekend just gone has had a Crab Festival. Which means crabs EVERYWHERE at the festival and at $5 a crab I splurged and bought 16 of the things, figuring that oh, there'd be 3 spare at the end of it. Nuh-uh. I have 9 spare. 2 more went off to other people. What am I going to do with 7 crabs? Eat them, naturally, but shellfish has a short shelf-life, once it's thawed (by the time I'd gotten them home, yup they'd thawed) so... what to do with crab other than just ...eat it? I made a Crab Soup. Oriental style.
I was gonna show you a picture, but my camera is flat :(
For this you will need:
Crabs! 4-5 of them, with the meat removed. Or if you're daunted at the prospect of shelling and pulling the meat out of your own crabs, around 500g of crab-meat. (Or seafood extender if you can't afford crab and wish to sound fancy and call it crab anyways)
4 tsp of sweet paprika
4-5 red jalapeno chillies, seeds removed
4 cloves of garlic
3 spring onions
Rice noodles. The flat ones that look kinda like linguini.
2 tsp curry powder
3 Tbs oyster sauce
2-3 tsp worchestershire sauce
2-3 tsp thin soy sauce
3-4 tsp powdered chicken stock
1 tsp thyme
1 tsp mixed herbs.
1-2 red capsicum (Bell pepper)
Procedure:
Clean the Crabs. Get the sweet sweet meat out of the shell and into a bowl. Without bits of shell in the meat as well, preferably. Put the meat in a bowl in the fridge. This takes FOREVER so start well in advance of actually wanting to eat, and take care not to cut yourself. I needed a bandaid on three fingers by the time I was finished.
Slice the chillis. Easiest way to get the flesh without the seeds? Hold he chilli by the stalk, use your knife and run it down the side of the chilli. One two three four sides, and you have four sweet slices of spicy red fruit on your cuttingboard, and you're holding a stem of chilli seeds. Nice and easy disposal and there aren't those little seeds EVERYWHERE.
Dice, slice and finely chop up your chilli flesh.
Top and tail the garlic cloves, peel off the paper skin, dice them up.
Put a small amount of spray oil in a pot, toss in garlic and chilli. (If you want a stronger garlic flavour, add the garlic later to the dish, however, lightly caramelised garlic is -delicious- so... it's up to you)
Cook the garlic and chilli until fragrant, lightly browned. Add the paprika. Cook -that- until it's fragrant. You know it's fragrant because you can smell it. Take care not to burn it, however. So this should all be on low heat (on a gas stove) and would take maybe 5 minutes.
Fill the pot up with water.
Add ~1tsp of powdered chicken stock to every cup of water required. Tada, instant liquid chicken stock :D
Add in: thyme, mixed herbs, worchestershire, soy and oyster sauce. Add the curry powder a few minutes later.
Taste! If you have vaguelly flavoured oily water, add more oyster sauce, paprika and curry powder. Take care not to overseason on the powders, you don't want the dish to taste granular. Can also substitute curry powder for siracha or tabasco sauce. Any spicy liquid sauce will do then there's no granulation.
Leave to simmer. Cooking cooking cooking. It has to mature, so you need to leave it to do it's heating up thing on it's own. Go watch TV, write a blog post. Something. Remember to get up now and then to stir your soup and taste to make sure that it's actually got flavour and isnt' just oily water.
When the liquid is tasting how you want it to, slice up and put the capsicum into the pot. Use the same method on the capsicum that you newly learnt on the chillis, slice each side down it's length, and then cut it crosswise to get pieces that are roughly the same length and width as the fingerbone in the middle of your index finger.
While they're cooking take out your rice-noodles and put them in a bowl of warm water to soften. Ooooor put them straight into a pot of cold water and bring it to boil. Same rules as for cooking pasta, when it tastes cooked, it's done. Rice noodles take a great deal less time to cook than pasta, so be careful not to over do them.
You -can-, if you want to bulk up the soup, finely slice some cabbage. A double-handful would be plenty. Just make sure it is -finely- sliced. It'll dissolve down into very little.
Strip the bad outer leaf layer from the spring onions, chop off the roots, and square off the green leaves, chopping off the wilted parts. Slice the spring onion into rings aaaaand leave it. This will go in -last-, like, literally, just as you're serving it up.
When the noodles are done, put them into your soup-water. Stir through. Add the crab meat, stir through -again- and leave for 5 or so minutes, so that the crab is warmed through, but not cooked more.
Sprinkle the spring onion over the surface of the bowls/pot, and serve.
I was gonna show you a picture, but my camera is flat :(
For this you will need:
Crabs! 4-5 of them, with the meat removed. Or if you're daunted at the prospect of shelling and pulling the meat out of your own crabs, around 500g of crab-meat. (Or seafood extender if you can't afford crab and wish to sound fancy and call it crab anyways)
4 tsp of sweet paprika
4-5 red jalapeno chillies, seeds removed
4 cloves of garlic
3 spring onions
Rice noodles. The flat ones that look kinda like linguini.
2 tsp curry powder
3 Tbs oyster sauce
2-3 tsp worchestershire sauce
2-3 tsp thin soy sauce
3-4 tsp powdered chicken stock
1 tsp thyme
1 tsp mixed herbs.
1-2 red capsicum (Bell pepper)
Procedure:
Clean the Crabs. Get the sweet sweet meat out of the shell and into a bowl. Without bits of shell in the meat as well, preferably. Put the meat in a bowl in the fridge. This takes FOREVER so start well in advance of actually wanting to eat, and take care not to cut yourself. I needed a bandaid on three fingers by the time I was finished.
Slice the chillis. Easiest way to get the flesh without the seeds? Hold he chilli by the stalk, use your knife and run it down the side of the chilli. One two three four sides, and you have four sweet slices of spicy red fruit on your cuttingboard, and you're holding a stem of chilli seeds. Nice and easy disposal and there aren't those little seeds EVERYWHERE.
Dice, slice and finely chop up your chilli flesh.
Top and tail the garlic cloves, peel off the paper skin, dice them up.
Put a small amount of spray oil in a pot, toss in garlic and chilli. (If you want a stronger garlic flavour, add the garlic later to the dish, however, lightly caramelised garlic is -delicious- so... it's up to you)
Cook the garlic and chilli until fragrant, lightly browned. Add the paprika. Cook -that- until it's fragrant. You know it's fragrant because you can smell it. Take care not to burn it, however. So this should all be on low heat (on a gas stove) and would take maybe 5 minutes.
Fill the pot up with water.
Add ~1tsp of powdered chicken stock to every cup of water required. Tada, instant liquid chicken stock :D
Add in: thyme, mixed herbs, worchestershire, soy and oyster sauce. Add the curry powder a few minutes later.
Taste! If you have vaguelly flavoured oily water, add more oyster sauce, paprika and curry powder. Take care not to overseason on the powders, you don't want the dish to taste granular. Can also substitute curry powder for siracha or tabasco sauce. Any spicy liquid sauce will do then there's no granulation.
Leave to simmer. Cooking cooking cooking. It has to mature, so you need to leave it to do it's heating up thing on it's own. Go watch TV, write a blog post. Something. Remember to get up now and then to stir your soup and taste to make sure that it's actually got flavour and isnt' just oily water.
When the liquid is tasting how you want it to, slice up and put the capsicum into the pot. Use the same method on the capsicum that you newly learnt on the chillis, slice each side down it's length, and then cut it crosswise to get pieces that are roughly the same length and width as the fingerbone in the middle of your index finger.
While they're cooking take out your rice-noodles and put them in a bowl of warm water to soften. Ooooor put them straight into a pot of cold water and bring it to boil. Same rules as for cooking pasta, when it tastes cooked, it's done. Rice noodles take a great deal less time to cook than pasta, so be careful not to over do them.
You -can-, if you want to bulk up the soup, finely slice some cabbage. A double-handful would be plenty. Just make sure it is -finely- sliced. It'll dissolve down into very little.
Strip the bad outer leaf layer from the spring onions, chop off the roots, and square off the green leaves, chopping off the wilted parts. Slice the spring onion into rings aaaaand leave it. This will go in -last-, like, literally, just as you're serving it up.
When the noodles are done, put them into your soup-water. Stir through. Add the crab meat, stir through -again- and leave for 5 or so minutes, so that the crab is warmed through, but not cooked more.
Sprinkle the spring onion over the surface of the bowls/pot, and serve.
Oh, also, less is more with the noodles :D
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