Last weekend we took the kids fishing down at the pier. It may have been the crappy bait, it may have been their excited screams, it may have been our total lack of skill. Whatever. We got nothing. Walking back to the car we passed a large group of Chinese people fishing in an unusual spot and as we were heading over to check it out, a man reeled in a crab on his line.  It was just a smallie, a little native sand crab not more than 10cm across the shell. I took my son across to have a look and lo and behold, they lifted the lid off their bucket and it was chock full of sand crabs. Now they had little English and I have no Chinese but we knew enough for them to offer me a bag of crabs and for me to accept. And that’s all I needed to know.

The Australian Sand Crab. Yes, you can eat it and (even better) yes, you can apparently also catch them. I am now officially harbouring a fantasy of catching a mass of crabs and making Chili Crabs for all when the Apollo Bay Kendo Club hosts its inaugural seminar. They lived a little while in the fridge, squeaking and bubbling and waving their wee claws, before I popped them in the freezer for half an hour. Preparing and cleaning them was pretty intuitive after cleaving them down the middle. The yucky bits are obvious but you really have to get your fingers under the shells to clean them out. They don’t have much meat in them at all but what there is incredibly sweet and delicious and the shells are great to suck on. The recipe that I’m about to give you comes from Wendy Hutton’s Green Mangoes and Lemongrass and its a really, really great one. I have made some adaptations based on the availability of ingredients late on a Saturday night in Apollo Bay.  This was an amazing dish: hot, visceral, interactive and celebratory.  So here it is: Singapore style chili crab, lah!

Singapore chili crab

• About 1.5 kg live crabs (prepared as per the description of sand crabs above)
• 2 tbsp vegetable oil
• 1 finely minced red onion
• 4 large red chilies, minced
• 2 tbsp finely minced ginger
• 6-8 large garlic cloves, minced
• 3.5 litres chicken stock
• 1/4 cup bottled chili sauce
• 1/2 cup bottled tomato sauce
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 2 tbsp Chinese rice wine
• 2 tsps salt
• 1 tsp black pepper
• 2 eggs
• 2 tbsp cornflour mixed with 3 tbsp water

Ginger Chilli Sauce

• 4 large red chilies, minced
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 tbsp finely minced ginger
• 2 tsp sugar
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp rice vinegar
• 1 tbsp water

To make the chili-ginger sauce, blend all the ingredients in a small food processor or spice grinder and set aside.

Heat the oil in a wok or large saucepan (I used a large saucepan) and add onion, ginger, garlic and chilies. Keep moving  over a medium heat for 3 minutes or until fragrant. Add the Chili ginger sauce, stock, chili sauce, tomato sauce, sugar, rice wine, salt and pepper. Bring to the boil and then drop back to a simmer for 10 minutes. Add the halved and cleaned sand crabs and cooked for about 5 minutes, stirring the pieces through the sauce. If you are using bigger crabs such as muddies, simmer the sauce for 2 minutes and cook the prices in the sauce for about 10 minutes. Then add the cornflour mix and stir through until the sauce clears and thickens. Finally, add the eggs and stit until set. Serve with rice or crusty french bread. Good with a cooling cucumber salad and a cold beer.

The second option is to buy them precooked and then just simply not cook them again. Now personally I find the whole pre-cooked seafood served straight up thing quite confronting. It makes me think of those embarrassing occasions when people excitedly tell you they have a platter of prawns and then serve up a pile of things that were cooked at least a day or two earlier. They usually smell wrong, have an odd texture and come with something completely hideous such as Thousand Island Dressing. Nasty.

So anyway, it’s Chinese New Year and I always like to cook for my loved ones at this time. Crays are still relatively cheap down here, they’re a local product supporting local people and so it just seemed right. What to do? I completely fancied the idea of a classic Crayfish stir- fried with ginger and spring onion. I last had this dish at Flowerdrum, so fresh the flesh was practically still twitching. But you need  a live Cray which I didn’t want to get,  mainly because the other dish I was preparing was a complex double deep fried chicken dish and I needed the Cray to be something that could be put on the table with minimal fuss. Here is my solution (Gong Xi means congratulations, by the way…)

Gong Xi Crayfish

• 1 pre-cooked crayfish, halved length ways and cleaned. Larger crays have a sweeter, superior flavour
• Juice of half a lemon
• Teaspoon light soy sauce
• few drops sesame oil
• Two spring onions, finely sliced on the diagonal
• Knob of ginger, peeled, cut into thin strips and finely julienned
• 3 cloves crushed garlic
• 1 – 2 tablespoons of peanut oil. DO NOT be tempted to use any other sort of oil, especially olive oil  which will not tolerate high cooking temperatures.

Remove the crayfish from the shell and cut into bite sized pieces. Separate the tail part of the shell from the head part. Retain the tail and chuck the head (or preferably retain it to make stock). Marinade the flesh in the lemon juice, soy sauce and sesame oil for about half an hour. At serving time, pile the flesh back into the shells for presentation. Heat up the peanut oil in a small pan and heat until smoking hot. Drop in the ginger and spring onions, cook very briefly, then add the garlic. Once you’ve put the ginger and spring onion in, you don’t want to be waiting more than 30 seconds before pouring the hot oil over the Cray. Serve immediately. No problems with the kids eating this, by the way…

It has to be said, however, that in the early days he was constantly telling me things that I didn’t want to hear. This is probably largely because Chinese doctors seem to have an uncanny knack of knowing exactly what you have been up to and there is nowhere to hide from their cunning diagnostic techniques. Anyway, my first consultation memorably included a ‘massage’ with hot cups and spoons which made me look as if I’d lost a fight with a tractor and advice to give up the chili and garlic. The advice was far more painful.

These instructions, delivered in a fairly offhand matter, utterly panicked me. Actually, it also panicked Pete. At the time I literally used chili and garlic in everything I cooked.  I mean, what the hell were we meant to eat? And, you know, I’m a hedonist and overall seeker of pleasure and (especially 15 years ago) tend to be disinclined to give things up just because they are bad for me. Anyway, we did it. We gave them up almost completely and in the process discovered a whole new world of home style Chinese and Japanese cooking. I do a lot of braising and poaching these days and the recipe that follows is a beautiful and homely hotpot. I believe that they are called lions head meatballs because the cabbage spills out around the meatballs like a lion’s mane. Pretty.

We went pretty much cold turkey on the garlic and chili for about 10 years. Although we very rarely eat chili now, the garlic has crept back in. I console myself with the knowledge that the fact that we live by the ocean apparently means that we can tolerate spicier food a wee bit more. Hurrah for the alchemy and balance of Chinese medicine! Either that,or my lack of self discipline is showing again…

Visit: Rosanna Traditional Chinese Medicine Clinic.

Lions head meatballs

I think you’re meant to make these with pork but I do tend to get through an awful lot of pig so I do them with chicken. If you are braising these in a packet stock from the supermarket, water it down so that it is 50 / 50 chicken stock and water and add some ginger slices and a spring onion to the pan.  

• 750g pork or chicken mince
• Couple of slices of peeled ginger finely chopped
• 3 spring onions finely chopped
• 1 tablespoon shao xing or dry sherry
• little splash of soy sauce
• little splash of oyster sauce
• Pinch of salt
• 1 tablespoon cornflour and extra for rolling
• 1 wombuk (Chinese cabbage) soaked in hot water until softened.
• peanut oil
• approx 2-3 cups of chicken stock (preferably home made and asian style).

Put the meat, ginger, spring onions, shao xing, oyster and soy sauces, salt and tablespoon of cornflour in the blender and blend well. Shape the meat into generous sized meatballs then roll them in the extra cornflour (making sure to dust off the excess) and fry them until light golden brown in the peanut oil. Wrap each meatball in a softened cabbage leaf and pack tightly into a heavy based pan or hotpot. They need to be packed in tight to keep their shape so make sure you choose the right sized pan. Add the stock, cover with a lid and bring gently to the boil. Drop them down to a simmer as soon as they boil and cook gently for around 40 minutes. Serve them with steamed rice and splash with soy sauce and/or black rice vinegar for seasoning.