Ingredients
- Jumbo lump crab meat
- Angel hair pasta baskets (recipe follows)
- Morel mushrooms
- Normandy butter (NO substitute)
- Salt
- Pepper
Preparation
Step 1
This one is all about the ingredients. It shows that if you minimally prepare fantastic foods, the only thing you can do is get in the way (by overworking the good stuff) of what nature has provided.
Make the pasta baskets first. Cook some good angel hair pasta according to package directions--Rustichella d'Abruzzo is the best. Once the pasta is cooked, run cool water over it so it doesn't continue to get softer.
Dry the pasta thoroughly. A salad spinner or paper towels will work. It will still be flexible as long as you do all of this in one process. Mold the pasta into a small, appetizer-plate-size basket shape. Fry it in some good olive oil 'til it's light golden brown and crisp. If you have two small oriental wok "spiders", you can sandwich the pasta between them and keep the shape that way. Make sure you remove the metal as they firm up so the browning is even. Put them on paper towels to drain once they're done.
The baskets will keep for an hour or two if you do this step ahead, but when you're ready to prepare the dish, put them in a warm oven (mine has a "keep warm" setting of 170 degrees that would be perfect) while you work on the crab.
Finely dice a couple of morels. They are very expensive, but there's no substitute for the flavor contrast they present with the crab. Fortunately, they're so flavorful, a few go a long way. The downside is that you'll only make this recipe in the winter or fall, when the fresh ones are available.
Melt the Normandy butter in a skillet. A lightly salted version of this is fine, as all seafood needs a lot of salt anyway. Put the diced morels into the melted butter and allow them to absorb some of the fatty goodness.
Once the mushroom are darker (indicating they've absorbed some of the butter and have gotten softer), warm the crab in this mixture. Be very careful to keep the pieces of crabmeat as intact as possible, but it's also important to warm them through.
Right before you take the skillet off the fire, add some salt and pepper.
Take the baskets out of the oven and place them on the serving plates. Spoon the skillet mixture into the baskets and serve with forks.
This dish earned me the highest compliment I've ever had from any effort in the kitchen. My friend Sally Smolenski (the best home cook I've ever known) took one bite, and gave me a look that showed she was speechless. Even the home-made lobster ravioli that followed it didn't compare. It's a moment to which we can all aspire, but perhaps never achieve.