To catch a crab

Growing up, I was very much a child of the city - I loved the Science Museum, the sandpit in St James Park and Hamleys, not necessarily in that order. I'm not saying we never left London - we did - there were summer trips to Brighton and Cornwall, walks in the countryside etc etc but there was one thing missing. Crabbing.
The lazy but pleasant pastime of settling down with a bag of bacon tied to the end of a line and spending the day catching as many little shore crabs as possible before setting them free.
So, a few weekends ago Jon and I decided to head down to the Suffolk Coast and put things right. We were going to go crabbing but with one essential development. The little critters were going to come home with us for our supper.
Walberswick is one of the best beaches in the UK, and a lovely day trip but more than that, it's a crabbing hotspot.
A mere hop, skip and a fairly long drive away from Sussex, Walberswick is the home of the national crabbing championships and therefore a very good place to go crabbing. Before we knew it, we were settled down, waiting for the first pull on the line.

We didn't have to wait long - there was barely time for the anticipation to build before we had both successfully caught our first little crabs with our smelly bacon. After that, the day flew by in a haze of competitive crabbing. I am reluctant to admit that Jon caught the biggest crabs but what mine lacked in size they made up in number.

Our lunch stop was The Anchor, which was absolutely lovely. Oysters, halibut with salsa verde and fish and chips - all perfectly cooked and washed down with some white wine in the sunshine. Perfect.

Post luncheon we decided to explore and try out some alternative spots, but like Goldilocks and the three bears, none of them were quite right so we returned to our original place, caught a few more then set off home.
Because shore crabs are quite small, they're not really suitable for dishes that require a lot of crab meat - we settled on a bisque as the best option for our catch of the day. This one was taken from Rick Stein Seafood. The end result was a punchy and intense bisque - and a worthy end for our crabby friends.

Shore Crab Bisque
900g/2lb shore crabs or other shellfish
50g/2oz butter
50g/2oz onion,chopped
50g/2oz carrot, chopped
50g/2oz celery, chopped
1 fresh or dried bay leaf
2 tbsp cognac
4 tomatoes
1 tsp tomato purée
85ml/3fl oz dry white wine
1 good-sized sprig of fresh tarragon
1.75l/3pt fish stock
50ml/2fl oz double cream
a pinch of cayenne pepper
juice of ¼ lemon
salt and freshly ground black pepper
Method
Bring a large pan of well-salted water to the boil, drop in the crabs then bring them back to the boil and cook for 2 minutes. Strain and let the crabs cool a little, then chop with a large knife.

Melt the butter in a heavy-based pan and add the chopped onion, carrot, celery and the bay leaf. Cook without browning. Stir once or twice then add the crab. Stir, then add the cognac. Allow to boil off then add the tomatoes, tomato purée, wine, tarragon and stock. Bring to the boil and simmer for 30 minutes.

Remove the tough claw shells from the soup before liquidizing in a liquidizer or food processor in two or three batches. Process in short bursts until the shell is broken into small pieces about the size of your finger nail. Avoid producing puréed shell, the aim is to extract all possible flavour from any meat left sticking to the shell, particularly in the body section, rather than to extract flavour from the shell itself. Strain the soup through a conical strainer pushing as much liquid through as you can with the back of a ladle to extract all the juices.
Then, pass the soup through a fine strainer before returning to the heat. Bring to the boil, add the cream then season with cayenne pepper, lemon juice, salt and black pepper. Reduce the volume by simmering if you think the flavour needs concentrating.

The Perfect Weekend

Those of you following me on Twitter will have figured out that I had a bit of an intense week with exams and revising and coursework and other fun tidbits. So it’s an understatement to say that it was a relief to finally make it to the weekend… it was well worth the wait. In fact, I might go so far as saying that it was one of the best weekends I’ve had in a very long time.

It started with quince cheese. A few weeks ago, my partner in chutney/pickle/jam/supperclub crime, Natalie and I were browsing through our local Turkish shop picking up ingredients for what was to evolve into the lime pickle.

Happily browsing through the vegetable section, we came across what I would describe as one of the ugliest fruits I have ever seen in my life. After a bit of rooting around the labels section we saw that the rather unfortunate looking fruit were quinces.

Tick tock went the brain. I have always loved quince jam, and, on my jaunts to Spain, the dusky membrillo (a form of quince cheese). For a long time too, fruit cheeses had rather appealed. 1+1= 2. And that was how the idea of the quince cheese came into being.

Brilliant as things are in theory, sometimes they are a bit trickier to execute in real life, as we found out on Friday night. The rudimentaries of making quince cheese are not that hard to get your head around. Essentially you peel and wash the fruit, deseed it, boil the hell out of it for a few hours, push it through a sieve, add sugar and boil the hell out of it a bit more before putting it into your containers of choice.

If only it was that simple. I’m never a fan of peeling things, however, it was the coring that proved to be a bit of a bitch, to put it politely. Somehow, it was only once that was done, we were a few glasses of bubbly down each and it was past 10pm that we realised that the rest of the recipe was going to take at least 4 hours.


Bubble bubble toil and trouble

What better reason to put on a soundtrack of eighties tracks and err air guitar to Toto – Hold The Line? None that I can think of. It totted up to around 5 hours in total. And at one point it looked like, well, like vomit...



But my goodness, I had a slice yesterday on a slice of Black bomber and it was heavenly.

That alone doesn’t a perfect weekend make. Those who have been reading for a while will know how forthcoming I can be about BAD dates. However, to balance the table a bit, for once I am going to tell you a bit about a good date (two to be precise, in one weekend).

The first involved True Grit and dinner at a local Spanish restaurant Galicia. Those that live within striking distance of Croydon would do well to make a beeline for this empire-sized restaurant who somehow manage to consistently serve up gorgeous tapas time after time in a convivial and friendly setting.

269-275 High St
Croydon CR0 1QH
020 8686 0043

The second involved (hold your breath)…. Leaving London. Well to get to Sussex, which isn’t that far but sadly, is a lot further away from the big smoke than I get most weekends. We went to an absolutely gorgeous place called The Hatch…..

It was delightful. Small, cosy and deservedly popular – you’d do well to reserve a table if you head down on a Sunday, as it was, we bagged the last available table arriving bang on the dot of opening. Though there’s quite a large menu involving quite a few fishy dishes that looked rather tempting, we’d come for the roast and that’s what we got…

The beef was tender, rare, juicy and saucily accompanied as you can see by the usual trimmings and lashings of gravy.



I did not take a picture of the sticky toffee pudding that rolled out for dessert but safe to say, the moment it ended was one of those moments. You know the ones where you honestly wish you could order the same thing right away and relive the unadulterated pleasure without a) feeling sick from being so gluttonous b) your stomach popping open and spraying everyone with the contents of your gut.

Colmans Hatch
East Sussex TN7 4EJ
01342 822 363
http://www.hatchinn.co.uk/

The rest of the day was spent tramping around Ashdown Forest, visiting Pooh Bear’s haunts and generally realising how overrated growing up is and how fun jumping in the mud with your wellies is. Maybe not quite enough exercise to burn off the luncheon calories but dammit, a pretty good way to start anyway.



And there we have it, the perfect weekend. Lets hope there are many more to come.