Today’s blog comes from Caroline, who has been hankering after a nice easy seafood recipe and stumbled upon this:

A few weeks ago we had dinner at Jamie’s Italian in Islington. I’m quite a fan of many of Jamie’s dishes and love the buzzy ambience of this particular establishment. However, having ordered the crab spaghettine I was left strangely unsatisfied. It was tasty but there just didn’t seem to be enough crab in it to justify the £13.50 price tag.

Fast forward a couple of weeks and I had dug out Xanthe Clay’s crab linguine recipe and decided to make it for dinner. The recipe must be a good ten years old and, despite good intentions to get my recipes organised into a book, it is still a yellowing scrap of newspaper (The Telegraph, I think) and kicks around at the back of a cupboard, periodically getting lost and causing great frustration.

The recipe is dead easy and quick as well, the only slight pitfall being the fact that you have to source your crab, which in these days of fishmongers disappearing from our High Streets is not always straightforward. If you are stuck, some supermarkets do tubs of fresh crab meat which can be substituted for the dressed crab suggested by the recipe.

The only preparation needed is to skin two large tomatoes, chop up a couple of cloves of garlic, a small bunch of flat leaf parsley and a red chilli. It’s then time to get the linguine on while you fry the garlic, chilli, crab and parsley in some olive oil. After a few minutes add a small glass of white wine and the skinned, chopped tomatoes and simmer until the pasta is ready.

If the dish looks as if it is in danger of drying up you can add an extra slug of wine. Drain the pasta and add to the pan so that it is fully coated. Xanthe suggests adding an optional 125 ml of cream at the end. I have never tried this, simply drizzling some more olive oil on at the end along with a squeeze of lemon juice. Apart from the scrumptious flavour of the dish I like to tell myself that it is pretty healthy too so the cream is a definite no-no for me!

Bubbling away nicely!