Crabs without skirts and cooked in Char Sui

So whilst on the BEST DATE EVER we discovered a great Asian grocery store that just keeps going. Seriously, you round a corner and instead of there being a wall there are just more aisles with more Asian awesomeness. Anyway whilst exploring we discovered (amongst other things- like did you know you can buy Edamame and cook them yourself?) we discovered Soft Shell Crabs- loads of them (frozen granted) but there. And in a box of 10! We lost it, right then and there in the frozen food section. I know it seems lame but I never bothered to look for Crabs before. I thought only Atom Thai in Newtown could do an amazing Crab. I need to learn some self confidence.

I'm totally aware that this is not the best picture but in my defense, just as the crab made it to the plate the lights went out. Some maniac had driven a cement truck into an electricity pole (and house) two streets over and then continued on a rampage of the Inner West. We lost our power for 4 hours but at least we had a romantic candle lit dinner.

If I cast my mind back, main ingredients include:

Onions- red

garlic

shallots

crab (hah ha)

Soy sauce

oyster sauce

Char Sui (totes special sauce, barbeque style)

Rice to serve

Just make sure to prepare the crabs carefully first, take their skirts off and their lungs or whatever off. Google it, very informative

As far as the sauce goes the Char sui is pretty flavourful so be careful. Just add the rest in smallish amounts till it tastes good. Not the best photo, surely not the more informative recipe but a bloody good crab meal.

x

Pasta Making

So I went on a kick of pasta making. After I was done I swore I'd never eat dry pasta again, but then I got tired and started working again and one thing led to another and one night I found myself cooking dry pasta from a packet. these things happen. While I was on my kick though I took some photos that are kinda fun.

To be fair , this was for a dinner party of four and was specifically cast as 'thank you' pasta and it was wonderful. It was a Sicilian recipe that literally involved:

2 eggs (room temp, ALWAYS room temp)

500g good flour (try that 00 stuff)

4 Tbls water

pinch of salt

You knead all that together to get a dough and then you knead it some more till it's elastic and yellow-y and pretty (about 10 minutes) then you wrap it in plastic and whack it in the fridge for 30 minutes. Then you just cut off sections and roll it through a pasta machine or roll it real nice and thin and cut it yourself.

OR you can make little sausages with it and then roll then over a skewer to make these little suckers

Which I was somewhat proud of but if I made again would make them thinner and more delicate. But they sure were pretty and tasty. You can do either with a nice tomato sauce or a creamy type thing, whichever you feel like.