Graham gets his claws into me – Crab and Spinach Ravioli

He’s a nice chap. Helpful, knowledgable about his fish and a pretty good salesman too. I was in George’s Fish Shop last weekend to get a couple of pieces of fish. We had a chat about the blog and classic cars (as men do). Graham mentioned that he had some lovely fresh crab claws and he would let me have them at a very good price….

I am, as anybody who knows me will testify, a sucker for a bargain. “How much would I need?” I ask. “A couple of kilo should do it for six.”, he casually replies. So, I buy two kilos of the beautiful, fresh, crab claws above. Then the reality of the preparation dawned on me. The cooking was pretty straightforward. I dropped them into boiling water for 15 minutes.

15 minutes in boiling water. The easiest part of the preparation.

Next, I let them cool down, then overnight in the fridge.

The claws resting at room temperature before overnighting in the fridge.

The next bit was the fun part. I got to use a vice grips and a hammer.

The tools of the gourmet chef. Hammer, vice grips and small fork for the close-in work.

Eldest daughter weighed in for an hour of cracking, bashing, tearing and picking.

I have a cut on my face from some flying crab shell.. It went everywhere!

Once broken open, there was a lot of fiddly work to get the meat out of the shells.

Looks easy, doesn’t it? Not when you look at the pile of shells and claws in the background.

We had two big bowls of beautiful fresh crab meat when we were finished. The crab claws did not seem like such a bargain at this stage.

Good enough and tasty enough to eat straight out of the bowls. We resisted.

Next, I got my filling ingredients together. Time for an ingredients shot.

All the ingredients – Crab, spinach, soft goat’s cheese, lemon juice, salt, pepper and hot chili powder.

We used about a third of the crab meat in this recipe. First, I steamed and chopped the spinach.

The spinach action shot is not up to much compared to hammering the crab.

This got put into a bowl and mixed together with the other ingredients.

Also good enough to eat from the bowl. Again, we resisted.

Next I made the pasta. That involved two eggs and 200 grammes of flour, a lot of mixing and kneading. Then the fun bit. Rolling out the pasta.

After a lot of practise, I am beginning to get the hang of this.

I do believe that pasta was invented by an octopus. I always have to get extra hands involved as we get to level six on the pasta machine. The next stage was to add the filling. I did this in bulk. Firstly, it made the production easy. Secondly, it made for nice pictures.

Bulk production leads to bulk eating as only three showed up for dinner.

All there was left to do was wet the edges and between the filling.

Another nice shot of the pasta process.

Then I folded them over, pressing out any trapped air and cut them with a pizza wheel.

The pizza wheel gets used in another Italian dish. Eerie!

Please bear with me while I show you another shot of the ravioli. The little parcels are prevented from sticking together by semolina flour. It makes this so easy.

You just have to like this picture.

Last thing I did was boil them for a couple of minutes before pouring over some white sauce with parmesan.

They lasted just long enough to take this last photo.

It was a good thing that there were only three of us for dinner. We polished off the lot. I have never eaten ravioli that tasted better. It was light, flavoursome and very moreish.

Thanks to Graham getting his claws into me, we have two more goes at this delicious recipe.  Why not give it a go?