Seafood Tales

FISHY TALES
Fishy teas were meant for a Saturday, and often my wife and I find ourselves eating different evening meals at the weekend. Her favourite is steak, but I will frequently indulge myself with a fish dish.

So when the family arrived from Dorset this afternoon with a huge fresh crab, you can bet your life, that our previous plans for our evening meal quickly went out of the window.

So much so that I had to pay a quick visit to the local shop to get new potatoes, salad leaves, tomato and eggs to hard boil as a suitable accompaniment, rather than Mediterranean veg and mashed potato as had been planned..

Crab meat or of course lobster are always a treat, and of the two my own preference is the flavour of crab. This one was big, and turned out to be a female with plenty of tasty roe, the orange meat inside. The coral as it is more usually called in shellfish is a delicacy in itself and is delicious warmed and served on toast, and I’ve known of it used as an essential ingredient to crab cakes, or crab soup.

I recall a weekend trip to Normandy when we were there for little more than a weekend break to enjoy the local seafood, that I was asked to do a TV travel interview about Brits in Normandy and the reasons they often favoured that part of northern France rather than heading further south. The interviews were conducted on the harbour wall of a small fishing port, with a sandy beach and a few rocks below which seemed to be a resting place for some of the biggest crab I’ve seen. That was sufficient to focus my attention and the theme of the interview — “Have you seen the size of those crab?”

Back to this evening, inevitably there came the task of preparing the crab. So long ago that I last did one myself I had to resort to Googling it and finding a You Tube video as a reminder. Messy, but the result was well worth it.

Though my wife, still feeling a little under the weather after a hospital visit earlier in the week, resisted the crab, her sister and I made short work of it, as big as this one was, and finished it between us.

Well almost! I saved just enough to sneak a crab sandwich before bedtime!