June 1
Leftover Crab
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- Crab Pasta [View Recipe]
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Ingredients
- .5 pound pasta
- 1 tablespoon butter
- 1 tablespoon flour
- 1 cup milk
- .5 large lemon
- salt & pepper
- .5 cup peas
- 8 ounces crab (rinsed and picked over)
- .25 cup herbs (cleaned and chopped)
Instructions
We start by getting two pots ready on the stove. We fill a large pasta pot with water, cover it, and put it on high heat. In a medium pot, we melt the butter over low heat.
While the water for the pasta comes to a boil, we make the sauce. We add the flour to the melted butter, and stir with our flat whisk over medium-low heat for a minute. This butter-flour mixture is known as a roux.
Meanwhile, we heat the milk in the microwave for a minute on full power. We whisk the heated milk into the roux and increase the heat to medium. Using our microplane, the zest of the half of a lemon is added. The juice from the lemon is reserved. We continue to whisk and cook until the mixture comes to a boil. This takes a few minutes.
When the water for the pasta is boiling, we add a pinch of salt and the dried pasta. We cook according to the package directions, checking a few minutes shy of the suggested time. We want the pasta just "al dente". When it is almost ready, we reserve ½ cup of the pasta cooking liquid, which will be added to the sauce as needed.
When the sauce is boiling, we lower the heat and boil for a few more minutes, stirring well. The peas are placed in a bowl with a teaspoon of water, covered with plastic wrap, and heated in the microwave for a minute. We add them to the sauce, along with some salt and pepper (going easy on the salt until we add the crabmeat and taste). We then gently stir in the crabmeat and lower the heat.
When the sauce is hot, and the pasta cooked, we drain the pasta into a colander and then add it back to the pasta pot. We add the sauce to the pasta along with the some of the pasta cooking liquid, a squeeze of lemon, and the herbs, and serve!
- Ciabatta Bread from the Farmers' Market
- Herbed Oil
- Plain Pasta for the Kids
We opt to prepare a simple pasta dish with a crab sauce. Pasta is always welcome in our house—especially by our son. It also allows us to use up some more of the Farmers' Market fresh bread. Always adverse to waste, we are quite happy using two items on hand—especially when the result is so tasty.
In addition to finishing up some food from the weekend, Chris and our daughter finish their game of Monopoly. Our daughter won. Again. The only other after-effect of the long weekend is that Robin is very, very tired—mostly because the baby is not sleeping well. Hopefully, she will do better tonight with a belly full of pasta.