Sherry drunken crab

In the final countdown to the London 2012 Olympics (woo hoo!), I returned to the kitchen yesterday to try my hand at a making a crab dish using a recipe created by a dear friend of mine (thanks, Sujoy-da!). Sujoy-da treated me to this dish of his at his home in Paris and boy, was it yum!

The recipe is what I would describe as primarily French (rich in butter, herbs, garlic and onions; instead of wine which is more typical in French cooking, Sujoy-da's recipe prescribes port or sherry), but it has an eastern touch with the kick it gets from the spice of pepper and green chillies.

I'm more familiar with hard shelled crab but Sujoy-da created this recipe using soft shelled crab, so I switched my loyalty from the former to the latter on this occasion, and picked up a frozen swimming crab from my local Chinese supermarket.

To highlight the simplicity of the recipe, the hardest part was chopping the onion and garlic! Once that was done, it was just a case of combining these with the crab in a wok, along with generous helpings of a few other ingredients. It was clear from the taste that I had overdosed a little on the sherry (lesson learnt) but for a superbly simple recipe, the resulting dish properly hits the spot (pitures are below)!