Crab with spaghetti and cherry tomatoes

Ingredients

3 whole crabs

200g spaghetti

1 pack cherry tomatoes  

2 or 3 garlic cloves

1 or 2 birdseye chilli’s  

5 spring onions

1 lime

Coriander handful 

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/1364638/spaghetti-with-crab-cherry-tomatoes-and-basil

Here is the original recipe which I found on the BBC website.

I swapped the chilli flakes for real chillies, the lemon for lime as I’d no lemons left, canned crab for real crab, capers for spring onions (don’t like capers) and the basil for coriander.  Linguine would go well with this dish if you prefer. 

This recipe was inspired by our housemate who accidently left his crabs behind and kindly offered them to us as they needing eating before he was due to return.

With his assisting telephone calls, and my boyfriends help we managed to cook crabs.

Boil the crabs for around 20 mins in salted water.  I found it was more like 30 mins on our electric stove with 3 big pans of crab.  The water becomes really scummy and brown but we are told this is normal.   

                                       

I prepared all of the ingredients so they were ready to go.  With the garlic I sliced it very finely rather than using a pestle and mortar and chopped the tomatoes in half.

We made a start on the crabs before turning the spaghetti on as it does take some time to get the meat out and it is best if two people go at it.

This doesn’t sound very nice but you have to snap its legs off, after doing one or two though I wasn’t fazed and I got into a good twisting method.   We did attempt to get the meat out of the fingers but the effort really wasn’t worth it for the morsels of meat you get.  So I would suggest discarding its fingers. 

You can crack the body open with a knife there is some white meat in here.  The little brown fingers in here (dead man’s fingers) you can eat but again I would throw them away they are not very nice. 

You really do not get much meat out of 3 huge crabs although were not professional chefs so perhaps you can.  We really enjoyed having a go at cooking real crabs but to be honest it is a lot of effort and even though we were real careful to pick out any bits of shell there were still a few bits left which really put me off.  I have never used tinned crab meat before but next time I will be trying that. 

Set aside your crab meat.

Cook the spaghetti or linguine.

When the pasta has 5 or 10 mins left to go, slowly warm up the ingredients, including the crab, in a large pan with oil, using half the juice of the lime and 1 or 2 chilli’s depending on how you like the heat and add salt and pepper. You don’t want to overcook the ingredients just merely warm them.

Drain off the spaghetti and add gradually.  I added too much spaghetti and it took away most of the flavours so it’s best to add gradually and keep tasting.  Add further lime, chilli’s, coriander, spring onion, S&P if needed.   

I added a touch of peppercorn to finish off and garnished with a slice of lime.