9-19 Pasta with Pelosi - Crab that is!

 One of our first days in Ortona - we went to the visitors center at the edge of the old town.  There was a sign talking about the region and it mentioned two foods that you should try while you are in Ortona. The first one they said you must try is Pasta with Pelosi.  This turns out to be the pelosi crab that is fished in the waters around Ortona.  It means "hairy" crab.  In all innocence we reached out to the owner of our Airbnb and asked where we could get it.  Even though it sounded delicious - I was thinking a white cream sauce with lots of crab meat - we had never seen it on any of the menu's for the restaurants around town.  

She made some phone calls and set up a reservation for us at 8pm on Thursday evening at one of the old town seafood restaurants.  Now, we usually eat a largish late lunch and only snack in the evening.  In anticipation of a larger dinner, I was trying not to eat until 8pm.  By the time 7:30 rolled around my stomach was letting me know it was very unhappy.  It had been raining off and on all afternoon and evening, but stopped just before we set out to walk to the restaurant.

This is an all-out meal.  We even ordered an entire bottle of wine for the two of us.  There were only a couple of tables of people - and two waiter staff.  So we joked around with our waiter.  He had been asked to move to France in two weeks to work for the owners restaurant in Colmer.  We were lucky to have him wait on us as we have not found many English speaking people in this whole area of Italy.  Of-course we had to bring up the name of Nancy Pelosi our famed politician.  He knew her name of-course, we were not the first to remark on this connection!!  With a little research I discovered that Nancy had taken her husbands name at marriage, though her family is also Italian, she was not born a Pelosi.  So Paul Pelosi's family might have been crab fishermen from the Abruzzo region in Italy some generations ago!

I had a salad and Michael a mixed seafood appetizer before this dish came out.  I was so surprised - it is made with a red sauce.  If you look closely you can see some small pieces of crab in a shell on either side of the dish.  We had to open the crabs ourselves to get a tiny taste of the hairy crab.  The tiny bits were very tender and sweet - and left us hungering for more.  Mostly the dish just tasted like spaghetti in tomato sauce.

Now I will go back and tell you about Michael's conversation with our Airbnb owner.  Fishing and cooking with these crabs is apparently illegal in this area.  That is why you don't see it on the menu in all the seafood restaurants.  But if you know the right people and the right questions to ask you can get it.  And maybe that is why you get such a tiny amount.  I tried to do some research on this and all I got was that some Chinese crab and the blue crab has become an invasive species in Italy.  So take this all with a grain of salt!

We finished with this dessert.  The filling tasted like a cream with orange zest in it.  The shell was made with "must" from pressing grapes.  After all we are in a wine area.  We also finished the entire bottle of wine!