Your Next at Home Date Night & Cheaper Than A Restaurant: Crab Pasta with Prosecco and Meyer Lemons

(Vicki James) I recently made this fantastic dish and now have the biggest food crush ever on this wonderfully delicious pasta!  If you make it for a special dinner at home with someone you love, I can promise they will be impressed.  And hopefully, they will then have a crush on you.  All of the ingredients are elegantly impressive and the finished product is nothing short of divine.

But where to find these ingredients if you don’t live near a specialty grocery store?  Don’t despair.  Help is here!

Although I’ve cooked with Meyer lemons before, I never had a lot of curiosity about them.  I decided to educate myself.  Meyer lemons came from China originally.  They are a mild hybrid citrus fruit that was first brought to the United States in 1908.  There was a guy named, you guessed it, Meyer involved in the cultivation of the fruit in California. 

Frank N. Meyer

Meyer lemons are much milder and less acidic than ordinary lemons, and well, just tastier.  They are harvested in the winter so that is when you are more likely to find them available.  If you want to make a recipe and can’t find them, try a half and half mixture of fresh orange juice and lemon juice.  Use the same fruit and proportions to make zest.

The luscious richness of the sauce comes from crème fraiche.  What do you do if you can’t find it in the supermarket?  Guess what? You can make your own quite easily.  Take a pint of heavy cream and stir in 2 tablespoons of buttermilk.  Allow the mixture to sit at room temperature for at least 12 hours.  It can take longer.  You want it to be thick.  Once the mixture is thick, refrigerate it until use.  In place of buttermilk, you can also use sour cream or yoghurt.  I mean, who keeps buttermilk handy for a quick yummy swig of sour tasting milk? Not me!  Alternatives are good.

Now that we’ve taken care of the trickier ingredients, you are set to go.  The recipe calls for freshly cooked Dungeness Crab from the west coast, but I can vouch that any nice fresh lump crabmeat you find at your grocery store will work just fine.

Here is the full ingredient list:

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

! large shallot, sliced

1/8 cup red pepper flakes

About ¾ tsp. Kosher salt divided

1 ½ cups dry prosecco wine

1 cup crème fraiche

Zest of two Meyer lemons

2 to 3 tbsp. Meyer lemon juice

! pound shelled crabmeat

1 pound fresh fettucine

¼ cup chopped flat leaf parsley

Notes:  I was able to find 12 oz. packages of fresh fettucine at my market, not 16 oz.  I also found ½ pound containers of lump crab meat, but not one pound containers, so that is what I used.   It made three good sized servings with plenty of crabmeat.  I used the same amounts of the other ingredients that the recipe calls for.

Instructions

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil.  Heat the oil in a large saucepan over medium heat (I used a deep sided large skillet).  Cook shallot until softened, 3 to 5 minutes.  Stir in chili flakes and ¾ teaspoon salt.  Whisk in the prosecco and crème fraiche. Bring to a boil over medium high heat and reduce to 1 ¾ cups, 10 to 15 minutes.

Gently stir in the lemon zest, 2 tablespoons of the lemon juice, and the crab.  Drain the pasta, which you have cooked in the boiling water, and add it to the crab sauce.  Add parsley and gently toss.

And then just go nuts over how amazingly delicious this pasta is.  You can just sigh and die happy.  You might want it for your last meal if you happen to find yourself on death row.  Cant you just imagine the headlines: ”Execution Halted when Prison Chef was unable to find Crème Fraiche!”   Just keep it in mind if you happen to murder someone.  But this yummy dish will put you in such a great mood, that could never happen.

Based on the ingredients, you have probably figured out that this is not a budget dish.  You will probably spend somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 to $60.  But look at it this way, it’s absolutely restaurant quality, and you have already bought the wine.  It’s definitely cheaper and better than most restaurant dinners.

The Dungeness Crab