cook: crab garlic noodles

I’ve never eaten at Thanh Long, the quintessential Vietnamese-American restaurant in San Francisco, and so I don’t have that point of reference for the best garlic noodles. However, tonight I cooked a recipe as the baseline combination of butter, garlic and MSG.              

 

I'm not married to an Asian who likes to get his fingers dirty and pick crab for dinner, and so, for the white guy in my life, I bought a pound of lump crab meat to fold into or put atop the garlic noodles.

I've all the Asian ingredients and the pasta, alliums and grated Parmesan in my pantry as well as the mortar and pestle I bought during the pandemic, but I think I'm going to add a teaspoon of Maggi sauce for that MSG umami bump.

And away we go. I never did get around to braiding the harvested garlic, but two bulbs ought to give me 20 cloves and then some. I saw that the box of spaghetti wasn't full, and so I pounded about 15 cloves in the mortar and pestle.                     

 

Per the recipe, I mixed teaspoons of oyster sauce, soy sauce, fish sauce, and because I was using low sodium soy sauce, I felt okay adding another teaspoon of Maggi. I set all my ingredients by the stove.

First things first, make the sauce. I sautéed the garlic in butter for 2 minutes, and gawd it seemed like A LOT of butter, before then adding the brown sauces. 

After the sauce was cooked, I cooked the dry spaghetti in a 12-inch pan of boiling water. I didn't salt the water because I figured there was plenty already in the sauce.

I cooked the spaghetti for 8 minutes instead of the 10 minutes suggested on the box. Using tongs, I put the spaghetti in the brown butter sauce, not even bothering to drain the pasta. 

Fold in the crab meat and grated Parmesan into the hot pasta and sprinkle the chopped scallions. Dinner done. Without having cooked a vegetable. Of course, I shared the dish with Cecilia who said it was fantastic. She loved the crab which helped, she said, to cut the richness of the noodles. Yup, this dish is on my rotation.