These days, I am cooking a lot of sea food at home. Actually, I have almost stopped eating chicken, have it very occasionally. But, I relish my prawns and fish, though I don’t have the stomach for very smelly fish still. But, this is the first time I cooked crab at home. I have eaten crab with relish when I eat out. So, I decided to try it out. I tried this Mangalore style coconut curry that I’ve eaten at one of my favorite sea food places, Mahesh Lunch Home, in Mumbai.  Crab is really quite easy to prepare, and this curry took about 15-20 minutes to prepare. Of course, the crab was already cleaned and washed. I used two medium crabs which was about half a kilo.

Ingredients:

2 medium-sized crabs (cut, cleaned and washed)

For the curry

1 large onion finely chopped

8-10 cloves garlic

2 tomatoes finely chopped

1 small ball tamarind immersed in some hot water and juice extracted

200 ml coconut milk

1 small coconut scraped

2 sprigs curry leaves

For the dry masala

1 tsp cumin seeds

1 tbsp. coriander seeds

1 tsp. mustard seeds

1/2 tsp. saunf

10 black peppercorns

1/4 tsp. fenugreek seeds

4-5 dry red chillies

2 tsp oil

salt to taste

coriander leaves to garnish

Recipe: To prepare the gravy heat oil in a pan. Add chopped onions and garlic and fry till transparent for about 5 minutes. Now add chopped tomatoes and curry leaves and fry some more till they are squishy. Now add the scraped coconut. Fry some more. Now add in the crabs along with the dry masala. Prepare the dry masala by dry roasting all the ingredients mentioned above and powdering them. Add salt. Cover and cook for about 5 minutes. Add in the tamarind juice and cook for 2 minutes. Now add the coconut milk to make a lovely thick curry. Cook some more on low flame. Taste and adjust seasoning. Now turn off the gas. Let the crab steep in the curry for some time to absorb the flavors. Serve hot after garnishing with coriander leaves with boiled rice. I was surprised at how tasty this was. The crab was succulent. The sweet flesh had soaked in the flavors so well. I can’t wait to make this again. Hope you enjoy this too.