Crab fest part II

Originally uploaded by lunamania

Being in Orange County, land of the Costo size immigrant grocery store, means an abundance of affordable fresh produce, meat and seafood. Seafood is sold swimming and clawing, of course. My perusal of the Vietnamese, Korean and Chinese groceries coupled with the Monkey Mom’s discount radar pointed to a Christmas crab dinner.

Blue crab meat is sweeter than that of the dungeness and king crabs, but is increasingly rare in restaurants and stores. But H Mart had a box of blue crabs scrambling for their lives and Ranch 99 had dungeness waving from the tank. We were on for a full blown crab fest.

We steamed the blue crabs and ate them with ginger and soy sauce dip. We cooked the dungeness crabs two ways. One was a simple steam with ginger and scallions. The other was a fry and wok braised ginger scallion recipe. I saved the crab miso for pan fried noodles. Nothing says Christmas like getting your fingers all messy with crab…uh ok, maybe not so Christ is Born like, but it was quite tasty.

Here are the recipes:
Steamed crab with scallions and ginger.
Ginger and scallion crab in a wok.

The noodles were improvised:
Chinese egg noodles
2 tbsp of soy sauce
1 tbsp sugar
1 tsp Chinese cooking wine
3 inches of sliced ginger
3 stalks of scallions (cut to ~2″)
Half a bulb of garlic
Dash of canola or peanut oil
Miso of whatever crab is in the pot cooking
White pepper to taste

Heat oil and get heat through the scallions, garlic, ginger and crab miso
Toss noodles and sauce in the pot
Add pepper

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