SPAGHETTI WITH CRAB

You can do this with linguine. In fact that's what I'd normally use. But if you only have spaghetti, it works just fine. Make it a good brand of pasta. One of the best readily available brands is Garofalo. It has great  texture and flavour - the equal of artisan pastas costing several times more. Blue swimmer crabs are also know as blue crabs, sand crabs, flower crabs and blue manna crabs. They're around the Indian ocean, the western Pacific and the eastern Mediterranean. (These are the crabs sold as soft-shell crabs in Asia.) In Australia their season runs from November to April - our summer. Getting the flesh out of the crevices of the body and limbs is fiddly. Tolerable when cooking for two or three, but a sentence if cooking for a crowd. You can buy the crab uncooked and do that yourself or buy it cooked - if you're sure it's fresh. Apart from collecting the flesh, this is simplicity - good olive oil, garlic, chilli, lemon juice and parsley combined with the crab meat. Cook your pasta and drain it. Add the crab and stir it. A bit of salt and pepper and that's it. The original recipe (with linguine) is in the original River Cafe Cookbook

SPAGHETTI WITH CRAB