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.

Outside Food: Camp Stove Hash

It's May and, despite the long fingers of winter still doing their best to cling on, the weather is by-and-large improving.  For the next six months the light is green for living a more complete life outdoors - eating, sleeping and doing all of the fun stuff in-between out in the fresh air.  So, over the summer months, I hope to drop in a few posts featuring recipes that are best enjoyed when prepared and eaten outside - and I'm going to get the ball rolling with a dish that I have a personal (and so far unbroken) rule to never cook and consume under a roof:  Camp Stove Hash.

Camping food often falls into two categories:  dehydrated or boil-in-the-bag "mystery meals" that were invented for astronauts and are now eaten by kids on Duke of Edinburgh expeditions, or food that doesn't need a lot of preparation or cooking like tinned ravioli, packet couscous and stale sandwiches.  Camp stove hash is another story, with easily transportable ingredients that make a brightly-coloured meal that I'd probably pick off a cafe menu if given half a choice.  It's a two stage process though - so the first stage can be done at home before setting off if you anticipate working up a hunger and wanting to refuel as swiftly as possible.  Prior preparation and all that…


Stage 1:  Potato Wedges

• Potatoes - quartered lengthways, par-boiled, dusted with salt, pepper and a heap of paprika and then shallow-fried in batches until crispy. 

Stage 2:  Camp Stove Hash

• Equipment: Camp stove, pan, pocket knife and a wooden spoon.  Fork and fresh air to eat with.
• Ingredients: Potato wedges (see stage 1), onion (optional), chorizo sausage (the ready to eat sort), small bottle of cooking oil or butter,  bag of spinach, salt, pepper and paprika. 
• Method:  Find a level, sheltered, spot out of the wind and get your camp stove lit.  Heat a touch of oil and roughly cut your onion straight into the pan taking care not to add any bits of finger or a thumb to the ingredients.  Soften.  Cut the chorizo into slices about as thick as a pound coin and add these, allowing them to release their bright red oil and crispen up.  Tip in as many potato wedges as you want to balance out the dish or satisfy your hunger and stir the whole lot together, breaking down the wedges a bit and combining all of the ingredients - add a little more paprika at this point if you fancy it.  Heat through.  Add spinach a handful at a time, stirring it in and allowing it to wilt down before adding a bit more.  Season to taste.  Keep over the heat for a few minutes then share it straight from the pan.

Nature Tastes Delicious

"I love nature.  It tastes delicious."

This is one of my favourite quotes of the year so far.  It came from my housemate Matt in the middle of a dinner table debate about spurious supermarket meat and vegetarianism, and it sums up our household's eating habits fairly well.

Rabbit is dead cheap if you buy it from your local butcher, but it's even cheaper if you have a friend who has an air rifle (and license) and know a few farmers.  In fact, that way it's free plentiful because, well, they breed like rabbits don't they?  A few friends of mine lived off rabbit for a whole summer, just substituting it in for chicken in everyday recipes.  I found a dead easy recipe by Jamie Oliver where you stick the whole rabbit, a load of un-peeled veg and a bottle of beer into a casserole and slow cook it for 12 hours.  Then you put on a pair of rubber gloves and mush what comes out into a new pan, picking out the vegetable skin and rabbit bones.  It's called 12-hour rabbit bolognese, it doesn't even taste like rabbit and you ought to try it.


The same friend also stalks deer in season and so every now and then we get a supermarket carrier bag full of venison sausages and a roast dropped round.  Venison has been getting a lot of good press recently for having the highest protein and lowest cholesterol content of any major meat, as well as being completely free range and sustainable.  If you get a chance to get your hands on some venison then I'd thoroughly recommend it, and if you happen to be in West Australia be sure to check out the Margaret River Venison Farm.

A few years ago I made a lobster snare to take spear fishing with me, in the hope of wrestling a few big crustaceans out of the cracks in the rock.  No such luck just yet, but we have thrown a lobster pot over the side of the boat a few times so far this year, left it a few days and then hauled it in.  Pulling the pot up from the depths is like waiting to get a roll of film developed, waiting to see what comes out.  We've had a few edible crab, some spider crab, juvenile dogfish (a small shark that we threw back) and, deep joy, a few lobster.


But this is what we tend to pull in loads of around the Cornish coast this time of year.  Mackerel.  Loads of them, unless there're a lot of dolphins about in which case they eat them all first.  Fishing for sea bass and bream is a lot more rewarding...when you actually get a fish.  Drop a line with some mackerel feathers into the sea however, either off the rocks at mid tide or over the side of a boat and you'll struggle to reel your line in fast enough.  Gut, slash three or four times on either side, oil, salt, pepper and onto a hot bbq grill later that day or evening.  Fresh, filling and free.

What's the point of all of this?  Well wherever you live, be it in the middle of a city, amidst the fields and woods of the countryside or next to the sea, you can eat pretty well.  Vegetable patches, pots and planters, window boxes, organic vegetable box delivery services, a good local butcher, a decent fishmonger, a fishing rod...the list goes on.  You can eat really, really, well if you grow, catch, kill or buy what's in season (asparagus, radishes, broad beans, crab, mackerel and seabass right now in the uk), it might just take a bit of forethought, some planning, and in the case of skinning and gutting rabbits a poor sense of smell or a strong stomach.

Images from top to bottom:

• Herbs and my annual "tallest sunflower" entries on the kitchen windowsill, a.k.a. "The garden of death".
• One for the pot, Cornwall, Spring evening 2012.
• The Polbilly lobster pot delivers dinner and a marine biology lesson.
• Catch of the day on a Padstow fishing boat.
• Dinner.
• The simplest Summer dinner?

Green Peace Oop

On my wall I have a big motivation montage; a collection of pictures, images and quotes to prompt me to get on and do the right thing. On it there's a photo of Trevor and Margaret, a really lovely couple who I did some work for when a big macrocarpa tree (monterey cypress) came down on their small holding on Waiheke Island in the Hauraki Gulf just off Auckland in New Zealand. They'd been involved with Greenpeace since way back when and Margaret had been the cook on the Rainbow Warrior when the French Secret Service planted a limpet mine on it and sunk it in Auckland harbour, killing a Portuguese journalist who was trapped on board. In big red letters next to the image it says "make sure you end up like this when you're older".

They fed me a lot of soup whilst I was chopping up their massive tree, and in the evenings I copied out a lot of recipes from Margaret's files. My favourite was this one, I've renamed it "Green Peace Oop". It's real easy and you can mess around with it heaps, here's how you make it:

• Dried green peas
• Onions
• Vegetable stock

Boil these together in the vegetable stock until soft (but watch it as it can foam).

Puree it and then add frozen peas or green beans, diced red pepper, chunks of ham or gammon, whatever you've got in the fridge or cupboard. Get fuelled and then go chop some wood.