Recipe 17 - Crab & Fennel Spaghetti

Cliff notes on thoughts about this recipe: never had crab in pasta before and never had fennel in anything before (at least, I don’t think so). I’ve eaten crab on many other occasions either straight from the shell at Chinese restaurants or after friends have gone crab fishing but I’ve never ordered pasta with crab nor do I cook with it at home. Fennel, on the other hand, I’ve never paid much attention to it except thinking it looks kind of cool at grocery stores. This should be fun and hopefully tasty! 

The Shopping Experience

Crab, as I expected, gave me a little bit of grief when trying to find it. In fact, none of my grocery stores seemed to carry any form of fresh crab; in fact, most places only had imitation crab. Finally, following my boyfriend’s recommendation of looking for canned crab (I’d never heard of such a thing), we found some canned goodness at my local Safeway. The label on the can made it sound pretty good and since canned tuna isn’t a big deal, I figured the real deal would be better than Alaskan Pollock masquerading as crab. 

Alternatively, buying the other key ingredient of fennel was not very hard to find at all. The only slight issue we ran into was deciding how big of a bulb we should get. Jamie Oliver’s recipe did not specify any weight despite the fact that he should know fennel bulbs could really vary in size. Inevitably, we just picked the one that looked the best and hoped it would work out to be enough.

The Cooking Experience

My alien ingredient of fennel was a surprising delight to work with. It cut like a cross between celery and onion and was a bit harder to cut than I expected but cut very cleanly.

As I thought the cooking prep was going well and starting wondering why the fennel was taking so long to cook, I realized I turned the dial for my oven instead of the stovetop for the pan of fennel. D’oh! After they finally started cooking, I realized my fennel was getting a lot darker (browning) than the ones in Jamie’s picture. I’m going to blame that on photo editing but it could easily be because my pan wasn’t super clean or I overcooked the fennel. We’ll never know for sure.

I also didn’t love the fact that since we are primarily using the bulb of the fennel and just using a couple sprigs of the top, it seems like a lot of the fennel is wasted!

However, following that series of fennel related issues, the cooking process didn’t feel particularly strenuous or long.

The other unfamiliar ingredient of canned crab was also a pleasant surprise! The crabmeat looked almost perfect coming out of the can. I honestly feel like I, nor others, would really be able to tell the difference if the canned stuff was put side by side with fresh crab. 

Before I knew it, I was done and ready to eat.

The Eating Experience

This dish was really tasty! Not as good as the previous recipe of sausage carbonara but still really good. I actually had to cook some sausage for my boyfriend to go along with his pasta because he is allergic to most seafood (the seafood chapter of the cookbook is going to be really interesting) and he said it tasted really good and didn’t feel out of place.

The fennel had a sweet taste and was very tender. I guess I like fennel now! The sweetness of the fennel comes through nicely and provides a good counter to the spiciness of the chilli. The crabmeat absorbed the flavour of the tomato and chilli so there was a lot of depth of flavour even just when eating the crab

Final Thoughts

Overall, I was really surprised by the tastiness of the pasta since I never ate or cooked with both fennel and canned crabmeat. Another contributing factor to this surprise is that there is no sauce or sauce replacement for this pasta; unlike the simple carbonara sauce or the blended spinach from the previous two recipes.

This recipe might actually encourage me to try cooking my own pasta dishes with just a little bit of pasta water and veggies as a base. If any of my innovations taste good, I’ll make sure to report!

Total estimated cook time: 18 minutes

Total actual cook time: 35 minutes (not too shabby!)