Breath of the Wild #21: Crab Stir-Fry

 Ingredients: Any Crab, Goron Spice

Description: "The Goron spice used in preparing this crab pairs perfectly with the flavor of its meat."

Yoo I went to the asian supermarket and they had the crab bits! This is the closest I can get to affordable whole crab I think.

It comes fast frozen in a big ol' block, so ill let it defrost for most of the day. I just put it on a plastic steamer tray in my sink.

You don't wanna re-freeze or wait too long with the defrosted meat, so im gonna gonna boil almost all of them (except a later grilled crab recipe). I noticed a lot of threads in with the crabs that I took out, maybe they were bits of plastic fishing net? So to be safe im not going to reuse the water i boiled them in for seafood stock.

Alright, heres the rest of the set up! I guess this isnt exactly a stir fry, but I thought for the goron spiced crab it would be cool to make it a whole laksa curry and pop the crab on top! So i've got the laksa curry paste and coconut milk, and to fill it out (since its gonna make a big batch!) ive got udon noodles, beansprouts, a few lotus roots, lots of "crab" sticks (surimi), spring onions, chillies, coriander and the tiniest bit of mint (its not growing so well outside in the middle of winter!)

Wow this packet starts with 1.5l of water before I even add other ingredients... i should have used my even bigger pot... Also this smells like itll be plenty spicy so ive decided to forget about adding extra chillies.

I guess i should put the frozen lotus roots in early, and then I guess i can put in the crab and surimi sticks to flavour it..? Most of these ingredients wont need long to cook at all, the udon is part-cooked and beansprouts only need a few minutes (i learned this today lol, turns out i was always overcooking them)

Oh i should add the coconut milk next...

Argh disaster!! the coconut milk had separated so when i tipped it in liquid behind the the solid chunk just blasted my damn hob! Well... while we're making a mess we might as well admit that we need to separate this curry into 2 pots if we're gonna fit the noodles in...

There we go, the noodles and beansprouts can heat up, and I added the coriander and mint as well... I also scrounged a bit of lime and a basil leaf to garnish it with.

****

The laksa curry broth is soooooooo good!!! It's a great curry flavour to pair with seafood, tofu and white meats. It's so perfectly warming, spicy and fruity. Eating crab this way is a pain though, i ended up taking it out and scraping out all the meat with my hands and dropping it back in the noodle soup. It didn't have to be this way.

Malay way or the Thai way.

Mode: 2 Player
Hardware: Steamer, pans, tupperware.
Accessories: Cup of coffee

Had a mostly full can of coconut milk leftover from the cakes. I figured I better find something to do with it before it expired and probably stank up my fridge, if coconut milk even does that, I actually don't know.

Yet.

Anyway, so I decided to make a coconut-based curry sauce and save it in the fridge for later. I quickly looked at the ingredients for a Thai green curry, and figured I could bodge together something along those lines.

Concentrated lemongrass is like a lemon party in your mouth.

In a brilliant twist, I had also gotten given some fancy pastes and spices for my birthday, and that included a nice little jar of concentrated lemongrass. So I heated up a pan, added some oil (this is gonna be dairy free, kids) and added all the coconut milk, a small teaspoon of lemongrass, a teaspoon of pickled ginger (that I chopped up) all my leftover spring onions, a couple pinches of chicken stock and a pinch of pepper.

I don't even like regular marmalade.

Now, all of the recipes seemed to cite using fresh lime leaves or lime zest. I don't have either of those things. But what I do have is this jar of lemon and lime marmalade that I also used for aforementioned baking. That will also take care of the sweetening aspect, so I don't need to add a tsp of sugar.

When you're finished with it? Discardamom.

Feeling like a bit of cardamom might help make this taste more curry-like, but I didn't want to be trying to fish cardamom pods out of an opaque liquid. So I tried crushing them up, and then putting them in a TEA INFUSER and dropping that in the pan. Some women in their early 20s experiment with lesbianism, but for me, it's unadvised kitchen practices.

Now you're imagining unadvised lesbian kitchen practices.

I reduced it down to a saucy state, and put it in the fridge for later.

*LATER OCCURS*

Now it's Monday, and my flatmate is back so it's time to cook something non-dairy and non-half-assed-bowl-of-mashed-up-leftovers for dinner.

The spatula was also a birthday present. Thanks Bro!

Put some white rice in the steamer, and fried up some chicken and onions. Once that was cooked I added in the sauce. I couldn't help but notice my Thai curry didn't have little green bits in it. I didn't have any shredded lime leaves or whatever, so I added peas instead.

Peas: the other green.

Lookin' good, ladies.

Chicken and rice are definitely lesbians.

Post-mortem: ***** Even better than I expected! I've never tried something like this before, it definitely tasted like a good sauce with a nice blend of flavours. So lesson learned: don't discount putting lime marmalade and tea strainers into things.