Yellow Leaves and Crab Linguini

It has been a while. Green has turned to yellow and morning frosts tell that the winter sun is set to wane. My sister, the oracle, has predicted heavy snows for the months to come. Soon it will be dark by 4 and the fashion will turn towards eating evening pies in chairs drawn up by firesides.

Willow has been enjoying walks in Coldfall Woods, and I have been riddling. That was until this morning. I was going to post a blog I'd been hugging over October on soil and the winter sun, but it is raining now, the soil bags have clogged and the sky is grey. That post shall have to wait.

Instead, we walk the woods and Willow chases squirrels up trees. A rude house sits high in one on our course. You have to wonder how it got there. It seems insurmountable to me.

I like grey days. They are good for many things. Today I read Tom Stoppard's Arcadia for the third time this week (anticipate post entitled 'Lady Thomasina Loves a Rabbit Pie' complete with recipe) and fought the urge to buy a pet tortoise. It shall be sleepy and serve as a paperweight upon the desk I am looking to acquire in order to finish my novel.

Perhaps it was tortoise on the mind but after our walk I purchased a crab for lunch. With it was made a linguine, the recipe for which I now share with you.

Shelling an entire cooked crab requires patience. For me, 2 implements help: a lobster fork for removing the white meat, which you can buy here, and a stone pestle, which I use to crack the claws. Anything heavy and hand-sized will suit this job.

You won't require the brown meat for this recipe. This is stored in the carapace (the hard cover which protects the head). It is delicious eaten from the shell with a squeeze of lemon and ground black pepper, or mixed with a little of the white meat for a version of the crab toast recipe here.

From a large crab I garnered 300g of white meat. In my books, this serves 2. A crab looks like a challenge, but an easy way to get past the armour is to remove the claws and wrap in paper before cracking with a pestle. Wrapping in paper helps prevent shell fragments taking lodgement in your home.

Then you must, and I repeat must tackle the abdomen of the crab. This would be the part most often neglected, and sadly so, for it contains the most meat. It is the tightly packed mass that the chelipeds (claws) and walking legs issue from. It is a complex and cavernous maze that if chopped in half and delved into with good earnest, shall reward with even more white meat. More than in the claws. This where the thin lobster fork comes in handy. An agile wrist also help.

Then finely chop half a bulb of garlic/5 cloves. Introduce the garlic to 5 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil in a heavy based pan and let the garlic and oil sit in each other's company for a while before putting the pan on moderate heat.

Even though the garlic is less likely to burn this way, keep the heat low and slow so that you do not fry the contents. To the garlic add a heaped teaspoon of chilli flakes, then the crab meat and heat over a gentle flame while you cook the pasta, which needs be 250g of thin linguine, else you'll lose the crab when serving it up.

I would have liked to been at the National Theatre in 1993. Rufus Sewell and the words 'carnal embrace' sit together well together in a sentence. Well, I haven't a time machine, so the plan is to take husband to a fish masterclass at The Hospital Club this Saturday morning and when that happens, you can read about it here.

Crab Toast, Cuttings and Crufts

The last few weeks have been quite eventful. Aside from not blogging, I hit a spot of bad luck and severely cut my finger, for which blame lands on my new Burgon & Ball pocket pruners. They still come highly recommended, designed with the smaller-handed in mind, or smaller-fingered in my case.

On to better times: Crufts. You have to hand it to the NEC. They run a tight ship, complete with shuttle buses. And bars. Many of them. It is something of a regimented affair, and has to be. You can only admire it. If you do not like dogs, do not under any circumstance go there. Je blague of course. Husband came and managed very well.

On Terrier and Hound Day there were dogs aplenty: Afghans; Bassets; Dachsunds... the hairy deerhounds caught my eye, and a particular Bloodhound who was very friendly and whose owner was my height (all be it a bit heavier) reminded me that I would one day like a very large dog about the house. Husband wasn't having any of it though. We were there for the whippets, and the whippets were there in their hundreds. Their four hundreds to be exact.

It warms my heart to say that we shall be welcoming a whippet pup into our home soon. Armed with the Day 3 Directory, Crufts became the best place to meet the dogs and more importantly, their breeders. Might I also add that armed with a large glass or two of Sauvignon Blanc, the best seats were by arena 19 in Hall 4 where we enjoyed an almost endless stream of male whippets being judged in the preliminary stages.

Thanks to our excursion we are all set to see a male fawn whippet pup on the 27th of this month with a view to acquiring it. The picture has been sent, the puppy approved and now all that remains is to squabble over the naming of it. But more on that later, for now I am in fine spirits and to mark the occasion shall share with you this from John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces on the arbitrary nature of good fortune:
“So we see that even when Fortuna spins us downward, the wheel sometimes halts for a moment and we find ourselves in a good, small cycle within a larger bad cycle. The universe, of course, is based upon the principle of the circle within the circle. At the moment, I am in an inner circle. Of course, smaller circles within this circle are also possible.”

On this principle, Crufts constituted for me a good inner circle. Wouldn't go there for the shopping though. The halls were over-brimmed with stalls but nothing tempted. Not the Poodle tapestry cushion...

...nor the pink bejewelled nail files (what were doing in the mix? For humans I hasten to add). Not even the £1,900 Mutney's doggy oven. Pet-noodles anyone?

Dogs and chopsticks do not feature high on my list of ideas for fun feeding. Canapés do though, from the making of them to their happy end. February through to March saw an industrious period of canapé-making. You can read about the skate knobs, salt cod croquetas and tempura canapés I made at home here. Otherwise here's how to make mini crab toasts, inspired by a starter I had at The Hinds Head in Bray (photographed at top).

1. spend money on a really good french stick, the slimmer the better (great skinny baguettes at Planet Organic) and slice into thin discs, brush these with olive oil and place in a hot oven till golden toasty
2. take a boiled crab, shell it entirely, mixing the white with the dark meat. Season with maldon salt crystals and crushed black pepper corns and then mix in a good tablespoon of homemade mayonnaise and the juice of half a lemon
3. pop a bit of the crab on each toast, drizzle with olive oil and dress with a few baby pea or watercress shoots and serve

I have a lot to say about The Hinds Head in Bray, so once I say it all, there shall be a link here. 

Finally onto the garden. I managed quite a bit, albeit one-handedly. The task of ridding the garden of all it contains means there is little time to dilly-dally. My father summed it up succinctly when he cam to peruse the quagmire: 'You have a lot of work ahead', he said. So work I did, and this is what I done:

I felt compelled to make a start with the tendrils that had entwined themselves on the green fence behind border 2. It is always easier to undo something than to build it up again, so this was by no means hard work, requiring little gardening knowledge. I would have done well to remember basic anatomy though as my finger got chopped half way through the jasmine. I dropped the Burgon & Balls to the floor, ran to the kitchen sink, finger under cold water cold water and then bravo! I feinted. 

When I came to, post hospital and tetanus jab, I managed this:

Please do not say that the green fence looks better now. Not the first are you to turn and ask thus. I concur. But that it is no good reason to keep it; it looks only better because it hasn't any garden green left to clash with. Et fin.