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It is an unwritten rule between my cooking friends that if you are going to buy a food magazine then you really need to commit to making a minimum of three recipes to get your moneys worth. Having received a subscription to
Australian Gourmet Traveller for my birthday I should get plenty of monthly inspiration for cooking and will be making sure I get my friends
money's worth. Well tonight the aim was for a quick meal between sporting commitments so a flick through the Gourmet Traveller and I had come up with a potential dinner idea. Tuesday night is often pasta night at my Zia's so settled on
Spaghettini with crab, garlic, chilli, lemon and parsley - don't you just love these explicit recipe titles - no mistaking what was going to go into this recipe. The recipe called for a live Hawkesbury mud crab but given this was unlike to meet my time restraints or my ability to pick up the ingredients I opted instead to substitute in Pre-cooked blue swimmer crabs - 4 crabs were 1kg in the shell.
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Well there is nothing like having to pick the meat from a small 250gm swimmer crab to remind you just how good value it is to order crab dishes out - the 4 crabs yielded enough for the 4 serves that I made but it wasn't heavy on crab meat, that is for sure. I also went for the cheating option of serving the legs and claws separately for my Eatees to pick at.
I always feel the key with dishes of this type is to embrace the flavours and and the simplicity - dishes like this really serve as a reminder of how simple can be just as tasty as something complex. This would be one of my favourite styles of pasta dishes. The olive oil infused with chilli, garlic, lemon rind and seasoned with salt and pepper was light but full of flavour. The toasted panko crumbs on the top added a delicious texture. The contrast of the sweet crab meat just delicious. The recipe calls for coriander cress for garnish though I am yet to find a place to source these - maybe I just need to raise my own corriander seedlings. Anyway instead I opted to garnish with picked coriander leaves just a few added a bit of extra zing to the flavour as well as improving the presentation.
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The finished product |
Call of the day from my sister on arriving at sport after eating our meal
I knew that second bowl was going to be a bad idea but it was just so delicious I had to. This recipe gets the thumbs up from me (and the other eatees) if you want to try it you can get the recipe here:
Spaghettini with Hawksbury Mud Crab Recipe
Walking in from work seeing the crabs on the kitchen bench made me very excited and the dish did not disappoint. So yum!!!! Unfortunately there was none left over for lunch the next day :( Was really light, delicious and I know why we wanted to go back for seconds.
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