The Wanderlust Foodie

Passport & Plate - Grandma's Fijian Crab Curry

Australia | Friday, March 6, 2015 | 5 photos

Ingredients:
4 blue swimmer crabs (halve the crabs into two)
one and a half punnets of cherry tomatoes
1 Spanish onion
½ a bunch of coriander
1 cup of coconut cream
½ a tin of coconut milk
3 tablespoons Fiji curry powder
2 tablespoons of turmeric powder
Sea salt (to taste)
4 cloves of garlic
A good bit of ginger
3 red chilies
2 teaspoons of cumin seeds
2 tablespoons of mustard seeds

To serve:
Serve with Jasmine rice (or brown rice if you’re feeling healthy), garnished with fresh coriander, sliced red chilies and a wedge of lime.
Place your rice into the bowl, then ladle the sauce and crabs into the bowl. Garnish with fresh coriander, fresh sliced chilies and a wedge of lime. (There is no elegant way to eat this dish but it’s full of flavor so it’s well worth the mess! Do not wear white and its best to wear a bib). TIP: If there are leftovers, save it for the next day even if it’s just the crab curry sauce – oohhhh my goodness it is good served hot atop of a bowl of steamed rice – it’s heaven on Earth!

How to prepare this recipe:
Best to cook in a deep pan/pot on medium to high heat. Put a good amount of oil in the pan, and when you see the oil bubbling, add the cumin and mustard seeds together and fry them off for one to two minutes. Then add the curry powder and turmeric powder into the oil, along with the sliced onion, garlic, ginger and chilies.

Fry it off until the onions start to get tender. Once the onions are tender (which takes about two to three minutes), add all the crabs into the pan/pot and give it a good stir so they are coated in the spicy goodness. Immediately add a quarter cup of water to loosen up the curry. Close the lid and let the crab simmer (for this amount of crab give it approx. 8-10 minutes to simmer, still on the medium to high heat).

After the 10 minutes of simmering, add a handful of chopped fresh coriander, stir it through and then add the cup of coconut cream and ¼ cup of coconut milk, and add sea salt (to suit my taste I generally add 2 teaspoons of salt).

Now simmer on a low heat for 10 minutes and then it’s ready to serve. This dish is best served onto steamed rice and garnished with coriander, chilli and a wedge of lime.

The story behind this recipe:
I was born in Fiji – hot, sticky, delicious Fiji… My parents had me while at university and so they could study, I went off to live with my loving grandparents. My grandfather was a hardworking surgeon, my grandmother was an equally hardworking stay at home mum. My grandparents were a renaissance couple who spent their time painting, raising koi, gardening and cooking and spoiling me with everything I asked for. We loved food. As a three year old, they used to watch me go around our home and bite my little teeth into all the half ripe hanging mangoes so no one else would eat them. My grandma would laugh it off, and I would happily watch her cook Fijian food. I remember her making mango pickles – cutting the mangoes painstakingly, laying them out to dry in the sun and then pickling them with an amazing array of spices… making traditional fish in coconut milk, Fijian curries with roti and ba ba cau – a Fijian square-shaped donut eaten with butter and jam or topoi – a flour dumpling made of fresh coconut milk served for breakfast with milk and sugar or butter and jam depending on the size of the dumplings… overdosing on mangoes during mango season… and on the specialist of occasions - my grandma’s crab curry … this was the to-die-for dish and still is to this day.
At the age of 6 years my parents decided to move to Australia and off I went to join my parents – slightly displaced and as the years went by Sydney began to be home… when my grandparents visited, crab curry was always on the menu – grandma’s crab curry was so very special and delicious that there was never any leftovers, but on the odd occasion that there was leftovers, we would try to be the first of the kids to wake up to finish it off. I can remember that when someone would wake up too late and miss out, it would always end in tears (but there would be ice-cream close by to reconcile the loss). We all know that nothing beats grandma’s out-of-this-world crab curry. Just smelling it cook brings back happy memories of my childhood and the biggest loves of my life-my grandparents, food and travel.