Outside Food: Bashed Crab

Last summer I published a couple of posts with recipes and suggestions for food to be cooked and eaten outside in the fresh air.  This summer (because of various weekend weddings and work commitments) I had to snatch outside opportunities as and when they arose and so we ended up going on a few mid-week overnight micro-adventures, sleeping out in bivvy bags or just heading to the beach to make dinner rather than doing it at home.  Smashed crab isn't a recipe; it's an assembly and it's perfect for when time is tight and the decision to eat al-fresco is pretty last minute.  There is one condition/requirement though, and that is that you can only really do it if you're on the coast.  Here goes:

• Buy yourself a cooked crab, preferably from the small boat fisherman who hauled in the pot.  I picked one up for about £5 from the fisherman who's cold store is at the top of the hill coming up from Chapel Porth beach near St Agnes in Cornwall.  If you're near Port Isaac (Cornwall) then you'll be spoilt for choice.  You don't want a picked or dressed crab though, as that takes away most of the fun involved with this grown-up finger food.
• Pack a camping bowl, fork and teaspoon for each person, nut-crackers (if you have any), an old newspaper, a jar of mayonnaise, the remains of a block of butter, a fish-grill rack and corn-on-the-cob (from your fridge at home, or stop by a shop on your way to the beach).  Go to your shed and grab a pin hammer or a small axe and some firewood.
• On your way to the beach, stop at a fish&chip take-away and buy a large portion of chips to share.
• Get to the beach and find your spot.  Light a small fire (we have a little fire pit that we take with us, the size of a large cake-tin) if it's possible to do so without ruining someone else's enjoyment of the beach, and spread out the newspaper using pebbles to stop it form blowing away in the wind.
• Sandwich the sweetcorn cobs in the fish grill and cook them over the hot coals.
• Open the chips and jar of mayonnaise.
• Start pulling limbs off your cooked crab and use the pin hammer or the back of the axe to get at the meat inside, then get to work with the thin handle of your teaspoon to get all of the white meat out of the legs, claws and shoulders.
• Make a mess.
• Wipe you hands on a piece of newspaper then wrap all of the crab shells, greasy chip paper and other waste up in the newspaper to take home and put in the bin.
• Throw a few more pieces of wood on the fire and enjoy the rest of your evening on the beach as the sun sinks into the sea.

Brilliant Bivalves

There’s a small oyster and mussel restaurant on the edge of the harbour in Falmouth, Cornwall, tucked down a narrow alleyway next to a chandlery and opposite a sailmakers.  You’d never know the alley was there if you hadn’t had the occasion to go shopping for marine hardware bits in the past, and if you go more than five steps past the closed door you could easily fall into the dark waters of the harbour. 

It serves nothing but shellfish.  They only accept cash.  It’s one of the most highly regarded food destinations in south Cornwall and you have to book well in advance.  A few of us got lucky last weekend and scored a cancellation, allowing us to enjoy some oysters (the final four that they had left) in celebration of a project that we completed last year for Hog Island Oyster Co in California. 

It set me to thinking; despite being an island nation with strong, deep, ties to the seas that surround us, we British have developed some funny attitudes to shellfish. 

Shortly after being commissioned to write the web copy for Hog Island’s new website I gave a friend-of-a-friend called Nick a lift to a stag party a few hours drive away.  He got in the car after work on the Friday and we got talking, and within a few minutes he told me about his PhD doctorate thesis, studying consumer attitudes to shellfish consumption in the UK.  The shellfish industry plays an important part of the Cornish economy, with £10 million in landings in 2013, however the vast majority of its output is shipped abroad to markets in mainland Europe.  I went to Falmouth Oyster Festival at the end of 2013 as part of my initial research and of all the stalls serving food, there were only two serving oysters and they had pretty short queues.  There were plenty of foodie types wandering around, but few prepared to put their money where their mouths were and actually eat oysters at an oyster festival.  Why?  When did the British public forget that they enjoyed shellfish?  Why has Nick’s research found that so many people feel excluded from “posh” shellfish, consider it a risky choice and have little to no idea of how shellfish are cultivated and harvested?

We used to eat loads of oysters in centuries past – in Victorian London oysters were viewed as far from exclusive and were more commonly consumed as a cheap source of protein amongst the poor and destitute of the capital’s East End.  But then, as in many other oyster-rich regions around the world, natural resources were over-harvested and stocks collapsed.  By the time you get around to the modern day, when oysters are carefully cultivated and harvested, the post war mechanisation of food production and a mid-century desire to be able to mass-produce and sell us our food frozen or in tins did the British public’s attitude to consuming raw shellfish no favours.  That is changing, but slowly, and I still believe we’re an awfully long way behind mainland Europe, American and Australasia.  It makes me thankful that I grew up in a house with a shucking knife in the cutlery drawer (in a special box of tools labelled "seafood and eat it").

But I digress; prior to going off on an enormous tangent I had every intention of sharing with you some of the incredible oyster facts that I learnt whilst working on the Hog Island project.  I did a lot of background reading, digging through my collection of Steinbeck for references to oysters and learning an enormous amount from Rowan Jacobsen’s incredibly well written (and witty) “A Geography of Oysters”.  Did you know, for example, that oysters are one of the few organisms that actually lose the ability to move and see as they develop?  Yup, as larvae, oysters are able to move (by fluttering tiny cilia hairs) and differentiate light and dark (i.e. up and down) using a primitive “eye” – both of which they immediately devolve once they have found their spot and cemented themselves to their preferred substrate.  Once locked in place they have no further need for such trivial things as seeing and moving, and retaining both of these abilities simply diverts energy away from their chief tasks of eating and reproducing.  The lack of such recognisable requirements for a regular life as eyes and legs should really make them modern society’s ideal food source, as there go most of our qualms about eating a sentient organism. 

Oysters are also very good for the marine environment:  In order to eat, bivalves such as oysters filter seawater across their gills and filter out any plankton to eat.  Oysters can filter as much as fifty gallons a day, so the argument for them actually improving an ecosystem is a very strong and scientifically proven one.  Oyster farms are environmentally benign and are high up on most lists of sustainable seafood.  Before I keep on writing and do myself out of any more work, I probably ought direct you to the Science and Policy pages of the Hog Island site, where you can read plenty more about sustainable shellfish farming and their research into ocean acidification.  And if you’re hungry to get more brass tacks on bivalves then check out “A Geography of Oysters”.

I hope that the next time you have the opportunity to hold an oyster up to your lips and tip your head back you recall this post and choose to do so.  I certainly will, if for no other reason than because they TASTE OF THE SEA, and I bloody love the sea.

All images courtesy and copyright of Hog Island Oyster Co.

        

Outside Food: ABC (Autumn Beach Chilli)

There are four key ingredients that elevate this beach campfire meal above a normal chilli:  bacon, beer, dark chocolate and accidental campfire ash.  It’s ideal for keeping the dream alive into the autumn, as you can keep warm around the fire on the beach after surfing if you’re at the sort of spot where you can light a discreet fire that won’t spoil anybody else’s enjoyment of the place.  Alternatively, you could always do it over a fire pit in your garden if you have one.

I’m going to assume that you’ve all cooked some sort of "minced beef and tomato" based meal at some point in your life (chilli, bolognaise, cottage pie etc) so will let you work out for yourself the quantities of ingredients based on the number of people that you’re feeding and how hungry they are.  This will do for about 4 hungry adults who’ve spent a few hours paddling in the sea.

You will need:

• Decent firewood (bits of tree that still look like bits of tree - nothing tanilised like garden decking and no crap gluey scrap wood like plywood or MDF)
• Charcoal (bag of)
• A dutch oven (big, heavy cast iron cauldron) or a heavy old casserole pot, and somebody willing and able to carry it to wherever you’re cooking.
• Tin foil
• Knife
• Wooden spoon
• Bowls + something to eat with
• Cup + scissors (optional)

• A couple of onions
• A couple of carrots
• A few cloves of garlic or a decent squirt from a handy tube of minced garlic.
• 10 or 12 Mushrooms
• Red and green chili pepper, more or less depending on heat
• Green and Yellow pepper
• 1 or 2 fancy long red Ramiro peppers
• Bunch of coriander
• Block of butter
• Small bar of dark chocolate
• Beef stock cube or pot
• Tin of red kidney beans
• 2 tins of chopped tomatoes
• Salt, pepper and paprika
• Beer – a couple of those small French stubbies in green glass bottles is ideal.
• Bacon lardons or cubed pancetta – handful of.
• Beef mince, about two handfuls is the way I describe the quantity that I need to my local butcher.  He has normal blokey hands, but I don’t know what this translates to in grams.
• Jacket potatoes or rice

Method:

• Light a small, hot fire surrounded by rocks somewhere that you’re not going to incur the anger of any busy bodies and where you can easily put out the fire and leave no trace of it ever having been your outside kitchen.
• Once it’s well established, add charcoal and allow to get to a nice, white, even cooking temperature just like a conventional bbq.
• Don’t cook over raging flames – wait for white, dusty, embers which give off an even heat.
• If you’re going with baked potatoes then spike them, wrap them in foil and place them in the embers to bake for an hour or so.
• Place the Dutch oven on the white coals.  If you’ve got a fancy tripod then hang it from that.
• Things happen quickly when Dutch ovens get hot, so be ready.
• Throw in a thick slice of butter and melt.
• Roughly cut onions and carrots into this and soften until the onion is translucent.
• Add bacon lardons or pancetta cubes.  Fry.
• Mix in minced beef, chopped chilis and garlic.  Brown.
• Season with salt, pepper and paprika.
• Add about half the bar of dark chocolate, in bits.
• Roughly chop in peppers and mushrooms (can be left whole).  Soften.
• Throw in both tins of tomatoes.
• Put in the beef stock cube or pot.
• Pour in a load of beer.
• If you’re having rice then put a pot of water on for the rice the appropriate amount of time before you plan to eat.
• Let it bubble away and keep stirring.  You can’t control the heat aside from moving it to a cooler part of the fire so just go with it.  Ash will most likely float into the pot too.  So what?  You can’t stop that and it’s just the same as burning meat on a bbq.
• If you need to add more liquid (beer or water) then do so.  Over the course of 45 minutes or so it should reduce down to a nice thick consistency with a gloopy, shiny gravy.
• 5 minutes before serving tip in the can of red kidney beans.
• Tear up the coriander or, alternatively, put it all in a cup and chop in the cup with scissors.  Throw that in.
• Check seasoning and adjust if necessary.
• Hook out the potatoes (hoping that they haven’t just turned to lumps of coal) and butter, or drain the rice.
• Pile into an enamel bowl.
• Serve with more beer and smoke in your eyes.

When you’re done make sure you kick out your fire or pour a few buckets of seawater on it and dig the ashes deep into the sand.  Take all of your stuff away and don’t leave any trace – there’s nothing worse than being the first person on the beach in the morning and seeing a beautiful beach with a blemish of somebody’s campfire from the night before spoiling the pristine sand.

Also...

Wavelength Issue 235 Out Now from Wavelength Media on Vimeo.

If you're UK based and have wandered past the magazine rack in your local newsagent in the past week then you may have seen the latest issue of Wavelength Magazine (#235 Autumn 2014), and if you're particularly eagle-eyed then you may have seen my name on the new-look front cover.  I feel honoured that Tim Nunn and the team at Wavelength thought my photography worthy of a portfolio feature and ran some of my favourite surf images across several double page spreads.  These are images that I've been sitting on for a while, only letting them see the light of day at exhibitions as I was hoping that they might eventually appear at size in print.  I'm so pleased that they're now out there for others to see rather than just sitting on my hard drive.  I'm also really grateful to Mr Chris Nelson (of Approaching Lines and the London Surf/Film Festival) for writing an introduction that made me both laugh and blush in equal measure...and for giving me a new nickname.  

I'd be stoked if you take a moment to check it out, and hopefully see fit to purchase a copy to help support print media.