Mr Krabbs goes to Bandon
Posted on February 19, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Cooking, Cork, Food.
Only two months later I get around to blogging our Spider Crab adventure from a few weeks before Christmas. We got a massive one for a few euro in Antcar in Union Hall. At this stage Oisín is totally cool with crustaceans, poor Sibéal was a bit shocked when I arrived back to the car with it.
He stayed in the cooler whilst we did the Skibbereen Winter Wonderland. It wasn’t _quite_ Disney but the kids had a howl.
Sophie Grigson laments the lack of interest in spider crab meat in the British Isles and recommends it highly. However she describes the preparation of it as “approaching tedious”. To quote Bill: “Baby, you ain’t kiddin”. Over an hour with pliers and a hammer (yes, from my tool box, yes, washed of all WD-40) to extract a tiny mound of meat.
I did a lovely crab salad and a pseudo dressed crab thingy. Both of them were lip-smackingly good and the meat was really tasty. But I am never, ever prepping one again.
[tags] Antcar, Union Hall, Skibbereen, Winter Wonderland, Spider Crab, Spongebob, Sophie Grigson[/tags]
2 Replies to "Mr Krabbs goes to Bandon"
conor on February 20, 2006
Odd coincidence, I never heard of dungeness until a few weeks ago and now I can’t stop seeing references to them. Will you be interviewing them 
Podchef on February 20, 2006
Ole Hugh F. W. Can’t speak highly enough of the buggers. Tho he doesn’t mention how many hirelings it took to clean 5 of them. I’d rather eat a few of them than the regular tiny rock crabs so prolific in Cork waters.
If I can this year, I’m going out crabbing with mic in hand, in search of the best crab in the world–dungeness.