Chinese Crab Rice

INGREDIENTS

INSTRUCTIONS

The Chinese have comfort food, too, and this dish qualifies. You will need
a large steamer; if you don't yet have one, they can be bought cheaply in
large Chinese or Vietnamese food stores where you can also pick up the
glutinous rice. The dish takes considerably longer to cook than the
previous recipes but little more of the cook's time. By the time the rice
is cooked, it is saturated with crab flavour.
Finely chop 2 green (spring) onions and grate 2-3 cms of fresh ginger.
Combine them with 4 tablespoons dry sherry and 3 tablespoons light soy
sauce. Prepare three green blue swimmers crabs. Chop two of them into
several pieces with a large knife or cleaver and crack the hardest pieces
of the shell with a hammer. Crack the third crab thoroughly all over but do
not chop up. Pour the sherry-soy sauce mixture over the crabs and leave to
marinate for an hour. Wash 400 grams glutinous rice in several changes of
water until the water runs clear.
Put the rice into a saucepan and pour over it 1.5 L water. Bring to the
boil and boil for 5 minutes. Drain.
In the bottom of a heatproof dish at least 12 cm deep and of a size to fit
into your steamer, pack in the chopped crab pieces, reserving the marinade.
Pour the rice over the top and pack it down. Press the intact crab into the
top of the rice. To the marinade, add a further tablespoon soy sauce and a
tablespoon oil, teaspoon salt and 1 teaspoon sugar. Pour over the crabs and
rice.
Put the dish in the steamer over boiling water and steam for 35-40 minutes.
Serve. Diners deal first with the top crab, now half buried in rice, then
fish around, for the rest of the crab pieces in rice.
From an article by Meryl Constance in The Sydney Morning Herald, 5/18/93.
Courtesy Mark Herron.
From Gemini's MASSIVE MealMaster collection at www.synapse.com/~gemini

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