Chicken Feet & Clam Chowdah

We got seafood-hungry and extra ambitious over the weekend, so we went to A&S International Market in Raleigh to pick up some fresh blue crabs for coconut curry crabs -- one of our favorite dishes. While there, we saw that they had live razor clams, which we had been itching to try cooking ever since we had them at Revolution in Durham a couple weeks ago.

Now, the extra ambitious part: Since we knew the crab recipe pretty well, we thought this would be a good chance to do a little cooking video. Courtney got me a Flip cam for Christmas and I haven't had too many chances to use of it for anything beyond taking a 30-second clip of our cats acting doofy. Besides, I've been looking for opportunities to work on my video-editing skills. So with Courtney acting as the camera crew and the cats being armchair directors, we recorded me cooking crabs and clams.

Here's the video for your amusement:

On a side note, I now have the Iron Chef intro music stuck in my head.

Here are some pictures:

Here are the recipes we followed:

• Coconut curry crab: We've made some tweaks to this recipe, including:
  
  • Using blue crabs instead of the giant dungeness crab
  • Leaving out the broccoli and green peppers, since Courtney doesn't the former and I don't care for the latter
  • Tripling the amount of curry powder
• Razor clams Provençal (or "Provincial", as the recipe says)

All in all, I was pleasantly surprised by how well the video came out. Granted, it's by no means anywhere near professional quality, but not bad for two people using a Flip cam and doing something like this for the first time. Kudos to Courtney for the good camera work. It also came out longer than I expected, at 22 minutes (hey, we have eight minutes of commercial time available for anyone who's interested).

As for the cooking, the crabs came out delicious as usual. I actually got a step wrong in the cooking: I put in the oyster sauce during the stage where I steamed the crabs when I should have held that for when the crab went into the wok with the coconut milk and curry powder. But with the overpowering aroma of coconut and curry, that really made no difference.

As for the razor clams, we liked the results from the recipe. We underestimated the amount of time required for the cooking, as there was a lot of liquid that needed to be cooked down. Because we had the crabs cooking at the same time, we decided to not wait until the liquid had reduced by 1/3, as the recipe specified. The clams still came out pretty good, though some were a tad gritty. We don't know if that's just the way they are or if that grittiness is sand left in the clams. I think next time I'll add some salt to the water in which I soak the clams before cooking and see if that gets them to release whatever sand they're holding on to.