By Lizzie Moss
This dish is my Julie & Julia moment. Specifically, the scene where she’s putting the lobster in the pot. Instead of lobster, I was facing three beautiful blue swimmer crabs.
Seafood is one of those delicacies that feels luxurious but in practice is quite the hilarious exercise of tongs and pincers. I should note, the crabs were already dead when I brought them home.
Despite watching multiple videos on how to get the meat from the shell, I hadn’t accounted for the smell, so in the end it was mainly my boyfriend dealing with the crabs in our kitchen operating room, while I handed him the necessary surgical tools and intermittently dry-wretched.
Preparing your own seafood can be somewhat of an ordeal so if you like the sound of this but aren’t too keen on pretending you’re in M*A*S*H, I would recommend buying cooked crab meat. Most good seafood suppliers will have this available for you and it would certainly speed up the cooking time.
The simple sauce was inspired by a dish my sister-in-law had eaten on a recent holiday — homemade chilli butter with fresh tomatoes and a lot of parsley.
Ingredients
- Three blue swimmer crabs
- About 150g of butter
- 1 shallot
- 2 red chillies, keep the seeds
- A handful of fresh cherry tomatoes, all colours
- A handful of fresh parsley
- 500g of dried pasta (we went with bucatini)
Method
- Start by finely chopping a shallot, roughly chopping the chillies and adding them both to a blender with the butter.
- Blitz until it forms a red butter. You can add more butter depending on your preference for chilli (I left the seeds in).
- After giving them a rinse, add the crabs to a large pot of boiling, heavily salted water and cook for about 5 and a half minutes until they’re bright orange and float to the top.
- On a clean chopping board, with every kitchen scissor and knife at your disposal, remove the “apron” of the crab (the triangle bit on the underside).
- Then slice the crab in half, then half again.
- Remove any bits that look brown or gross (eyes, guts etc.).
- Breaking the legs off as you go, use a small spoon to scoop out the tender white meat into a bowl.
- Don’t be surprised if there’s not a lot of meat. And check for shell bits before setting the meat aside.
- In another pot, start cooking your bucatini.
- In a pan, place the chilli butter and the fresh tomatoes and slowly heat as your pasta cooks.
- When the butter mixture is almost ready, add the crab meat along with heaps of fresh chopped parsley.
- When the pasta is one minute off, add it into the butter pan, with a ladle or two of starchy pasta water.
- Mix to combine and serve piping hot.
