Friday, September 4, 2009

Crabs


http://crisfieldnews.blogspot.com/

I was walking past a suburb of Singapore, near to Nanyang Community Centre, on my way to NTU, to where I lived for 16 years. I was going to attend a party my girl friends gave for me. What do I see, something I promised for Patty.

Crabs are a favourite seafood of the Singaporeons. They like them as chilli crabs, buttered crabs, and black peppered crabs. The best ones are imported from Sri Lankas.

I took some chilli crabs cooked in a Singapore restaurant at East Coast Seafood park on the last evening I was in Singapore, all the way to Sarawak via Brunei. It was worthed the effort, the crabs were well received.

You can't bring in food to New Zealand, otherwise, I would bring in some crabs.

My students from Fiji tells me that the crabs from Fiji are the best. They say the crabs are very big, but the meat is tender and succulent.

My best crab story is the enormous crab my aunt T bought when she took me to Fisherman's wharf in San Francisco in 1977. The crab was even bigger than a Chinese soup bowl. This may be why I left my heart in San Francisco.

Crabs do not like me. I helped my neighbours catch tiny crabs in the swamp near to the house when I was a teen ager. We kids were doing for fun. The tiny crabs pinced us, but we were unfazed. We harvested them for our neighbours, and they pickled them. They gave us a couple to eat with our porridge. My grand dad said we were stupid, we spend a whole morning working for the neighbours, and they give us just a couple. Besides, we caught even the grand children of these crabs and soon, there will be no more.

On another occasion, when I was cleaning and preparing crabs, one of them pinced me so hard that I screamed. Even after my brother-in-law cut off the pincer, it still gripped me harder. This incident did not deter me from eating crabs.

In New Zealand, I see only the flower crabs, these do not have much flesh and I don't bother to buy them, as there is so much work involved in preparing crabs. But come Summer, I will go to Australia. There are plenty of crabs there.

3 comments:

aurbie said...

You should try the crabs from Crisfield, Maryland.

Glad to meet another crab lover.

aurbie said...

Of course, I have already met you. Heehe. In a blogger kind of way. Did not know you loved crabs, too.

Crisfield is called the "Seafood Capitol of the World." We like to toot out horn when it comes to our seafood.

Jama said...

I'm not a big fan of crabs but give me a plate of chilli crabs, I won't turn them down! The Malays like to cook the flower crab in coconut milk, so sedap!