Chili Crab, or Poo Pat Prik

This is great stuff. It works with blue crabs, stone crabs, Dungeness crabs...doesn't really matter.

• Several crabs. How many depends on how big they are and what kind they are. If you are using blue crabs, you will need more. Big Dungess crabs, of course, require fewer. Live ones are best, but frozen claws and legs will work.
• 1 tablespoon of minced garlic
• 3-5 hot red chilis lightly pummelled in a mortar and pestle. These are those dried cayenne type chilis.
• 1 tablespoon of salted soya beans
• 1/2 tablespoon of minced ginger root
• 1 tablespoon of curry powder
• 1 tablespoon of oyster sauce
• some salt, to taste
• 1 green onion, chopped, including all the green
• 1 celery stalk, chopped
• 1 tablespoon of cornstarch dissolved in a couple of tablespoons of water
• 2 tablespoons of oil. Peanut or safflower work well. So will olive oil. It gives a slightly different flavor.

If you are using live crabs, stash them in the freezer for about 15 minutes. Remove the back shells, and clean and rinse thoroughly. To remove the back shells, grasp one set of legs with one hand, and grasp the shell horn (the part of the shell that hangs over the legs, forming a kind of handle)...and pull up on the shell and down on the legs. The crab should sort of separate for you. Remove the claws and crack them. Quarter the crab bodies. Rinse everything again, and drain the excess water.

Heat the oil in your wok, and stir fry the garlic until it is light brown. Then reduce the heat. Toss in your ginger, chili, soybean, and curry. Keep stirring...there isn't a lot of oil and you don't want this to burn.

Add the crabs and stir fry over high heat until the crabs turn red, as though they had been boiled. Add the oyster sauce and salt (if you prefer nampla or nuouc mam instead of regular salt, by all means use it...) Cover and simmer for about 5 minutes. Then add the cornstarch and stir it in. Cook for a couple of more minutes, and then add the onion and celery. Toss this a few times to mix it up, and remove from the stove. Best served hot with freshly steamed rice and a couple of cold beers.

If you are forced by circumstance to use frozen crabs, well....it'll work. Most of the time they are already cooked, though, so be careful of overcooking.

This is a really messy dish....make sure you have lots of napkins. A nice clean washcloth, soaked in hot water and wrung out, is a handy table accessory.

The best crabs are those freshly caught...either by tying a chicken neck to a string and gently dragging the blue crabs into a dip net...or with a small dip trap...or by planting big crab pot with a bleach bottle for a float. On this last, we've had crab pots so heavily loaded with snapping, clicking little monsters that the trap frame bowed and bent.