I've Got Crabs! In The Good Sense.*

*Or, this time the kitchen kind of did explode.

In the spirit of trying new things, I would say that sauteeing Dungeness Crab ranks right up there with the most complicated kitchen endeavors we've attempted so far. It also makes a nice counterpoint to the cookie-baking experiment earlier this week. With cookies, I was actually constructing something from an assembly of ingredients, not just opening a package and cooking the contents. With the crabs, we were actively destroying something. There is a nice yin-yang parallel there somewhere.

Not that there wasn't drama a-plenty, and not just because I was afraid those claws were going to suddenly come alive and pinch me. My mom was allergic to crabs in her younger days, which meant there was a good chance that I would kick the (crab) bucket. But I like to live dangerously, so I was ready to try it.

We recently subscribed to Local Catch Monterey Bay, which for those of you familiar with community-supported agriculture, is just like that but for seafood. This week, our share consisted of a bag of four small Dungeness Crab, freshly caught in the bay.

We had considered whether we should research and invest in heavy-duty implements, but in the end, we just kind of went for it, following a recipe provided by LCMB for sauteeing the crab in a wine, garlic, and butter sauce.

The kitchen, as you can see, was a whirl of activity.



The recipe called to heat a cup and a half of wine, to boil off the alcohol, which seems counter-productive to me, but who am I to judge? Into the wine went the chopped garlic, the butter, lemon juice and Old Bay seasoning, and then the crabs, which were split and cleaned and cooked for us ahead of time; we just had to heat them.




Doesn't that look both amazing and scary at the same time? I've never before cooked a meal while being concerned that the food was going to crawl out of the pan and come after me.

We realized belatedly that we should have tried to further crack open the crab legs before putting them in the pan, as the recipe said this would allow the sauce to mix more with the meat. Using tongs, we extracted some of the bigger legs and twisted and cracked them and put them back in.

It didn't take long, really; in the end we moved them to the nice new bowl we got recently. It just seemed like the sort of classy meal that demanded new dishware.



Yes, the blurry part of the photo is indeed steam rising straight up towards me and the camera.

After that, things got a little less classy and a little more messy, as Marina handed me a mallet, and the phrase "Hallett With A Mallet" became legendary once more for evoking destruction and chaos. When you whack a bit of crab, it fractures the shell like an egg, and shell-fragments and juices go flying. It was kind of fun. I had intended to take photos, but I got caught up in the thrill of smashing things.

Apparently I am a boy.

And oh my goodness, was it worth it. Once we could access the crab meat, it was amazing. Tender and sweet and more flavorful than most fish I've had. Marina's favorite parts were the claws, but I enjoyed how the bodies split apart and kind of blossomed outwards into a crab-meat flower. We had Bonny Doon's 2009 Albarino and baked potato wedges to go with the crab, and it was one of the simplest, tastiest, messiest, and most satisfying meals I've had for some time.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, I have not yet died of crab allergies, so that is also a plus.

Help! Help! The Kitchen Is Exploding!*

*Note: this was one possible consequence of my attempting to bake cookies, but the kitchen did not, in fact, explode.

There are days when Marina goes off to work and I stay at home, due in part to unsynchronized weekends, and also to the fact that Marina has to work in San Francisco some days, while I am a full time telecommuter. In light of this work situation, and in a clever inversion of the '50s paradigm of the American household, I decided I would bake chocolate chip cookies to be waiting for her on her return home.

Am I a hero for inverting social role stereotypes? Some might say so. Some might say so indeed, especially since I didn't burn down the house, not even after two bourbons-on-the-rocks which accompanied the baking. (Is that the proper pluralization? If not, why not?)

Did you know there are a lot of ingredients that go into making cookies? I was lucky enough to buy just enough butter, when I bought two sticks at Safeway today. As it was, we'll need to buy more butter prior to tomorrow night's adventure in Dungeness Crab.

It all started two nights ago, around 10 p.m., when I asked Marina if I could get her anything. She kindly said I could make her some chocolate chip cookies. I hesitated, because what I had in mind was more on the lines of a glass of milk or a cocktail. But hey, I'm a romantic, so I figured I would give it a shot--"Uh oh, we don't have vanilla extract!"

I know, I know, that's what guys always say, but in this case, it was true. We really were out of vanilla extract.

So I made Marina a deal. We put off the cookie-making until today, when I was off of work and she would be coming back to Santa Cruz after working in the city.

I intended to bake in the morning, but one thing led to another, and it was four o'clock before I sat down to take stock of the process. That's when I realized we didn't have cooling racks. I know some people--Marina and my mom, for instance--said that I could use wax paper to let the cookies cool, but the recipe was precise in saying that you transfer the cooling cookies from the baking sheet to a wire cooling rack. It's called a recipe, not a suggestion.

So I had to make a hurried dash to the store to pick up a cooling rack or two, after a morning excursion to buy salt, butter, vanilla extract, and, of course, bourbon.

When I set forth, I have to say that it looked like chaos waiting to be unleashed upon the world, or at least upon Woodrow Avenue.



There would have to be method to prevent madness, and also to preserve our limited counter space. As I added the flour, baking soda, and salt to one small bowl, and the softened butter--butter can be softened in the microwave, FYI--white sugar, brown sugar, and vanilla extract to a mixing bowl, I clipped shut each bag and moved it back to the proper location. Who knew that organizing a kitchen could pay off?

It was a daunting prospect, so first I followed the recipe for a needed element of the cookie-baking process:

1) put a big ice-cube in a tumbler;
2) drown the ice-cube with bourbon;
3) sip the bourbon while figuring out how to bake stuff.

At first, things looked, well, gloppy, like a bowl full of ingredients.





But then, food began to take shape. Adding eggs and beating the mix with a whisk made things begin to stir and change--I belatedly thought of trying to figure out Marina's fancy electric hand-mixer, but that would be like Hannibal invading Rome with electric flying elephants: far too easy, and lacking in character-building.

I would soon learn that the worst enemy of mankind, far beyond pestilence, greed, and mankind itself, is flour when you want to mix it with something else. Good grief. At least I gave my arms a proper workout, but flour really makes you work for it. Now I know why everyone likes just buying cookies at the store.

But I persisted, and eventually I was able to stir in chocolate chips, and the mix looked like a bowl full of Impressionist art.



After that, it was simply a matter of spooning it on to baking sheets and sliding them in the oven, setting a timer, and then pulling them out to cool.

When I say "simply", of course, I mean after figuring out how to use another spoon to get the stupid cookie mix out of the tablespoon and on to the baking sheet in some coherent pile.

In the end, everything came out amazingly well. I'm not saying I'm ready to take over the baking of a wedding cake, but I'm really quite happy with the results, as odd-shaped and globbed-together as they could be.





And the timing couldn't have been more perfect. Marina got home just as I put the last batch on the cooling racks, so she entered to a house that smelled like cookies. That's just awesome.

I don't know quite why I'm so tickled about this, but I think there is a special satisfaction in baking something, because you are combining ingredients from scratch, which is much different than frying chicken on a stove, because you aren't really changing the basic components that much when frying chicken. When you bake cookies, you are actually converting a lot of different elements into a radically different product.

That's probably why I'm so crazy about these cookies.



As a corollary, I've decided that the phrase "You can't have your cake and eat it too" is absurd. You can always bake more cake.

Clearly, I'm giddy on power. Maybe I shouldn't be allowed to do more baking.

Or maybe that's just the bourbon talking.

My Most Fearsome Cooking Challenge Yet

On Tuesday, January 10th, I faced my sternest kitchen challenge to date. No, it had nothing to do with trying new spices. Nor did it involve stuffing one ingredient inside another ingredient. Nor did it involve trying to pronounce anything in French.

It involved cooking for the toughest audience possible.

Before I reveal the secret identity of the choosy critic, first I will present a new cocktail that I have learned to make, after browsing my Mixology app on the iPhone and surveying the liquor components we purchased at Shopper's Corner. Marina wanted something with gin, and I found a cocktail called the Water Lily. How could you possibly go wrong with a name like the Water Lily?

The recipe calls for 3/4 oz Gin, 3/4 oz of Creme de Violette, 3/4 oz Cointreau, and 3/4 oz lemon juice, all to be shaken with ice and strained into a chilled cocktail glass. The glass was chilled by placing a large ice cube in it while preparing the drink, and for the lemon juice, I squeezed half of a fresh lemon. Our backyard features lemon and lime trees, as well as a fig tree. Weep with jealousy, or just flatter me enough to cadge an invitation, your choice.

The end product was slightly modified from the recipe. I substituted Grand Marnier for the Cointreau. Also, I accidentally left the ice cube in the glass after pouring the drink. I learned how to make an orange twist, which surprisingly does not involve teaching fruit to dance to the musical stylings of Chubby Checker. In fact, you take a zester and peel a long, thin bit of the peel, which you then twist over the drink to release the flavor and juice. You then plop the peel in the drink.



It came out quite well, sweet and gentle with just a little kick.

Speaking of the need for cocktails, the super-secret challenging audience I referenced at the beginning was a three year old boy. Marina's mom, sister, and nephews came over for dinner on Tuesday night. As our pasta supply was a little diminished, it became an exercise in eclectic pasta-making, featuring half a box of penne, half a box of wagon-wheel pasta--not the official name, but I can't recall the official name at the moment--chicken-apple sausage and turkey meatballs, with a roasted garlic sauce. I had all four burners going at once, which was a step into a much busier kitchen for me.



Not remembering the nephew's previous reactions to tomato sauce, I served up, only to hear him immediately start to wail when looking into a bowl with pasta and sauce. I felt guilty; do I really want to be the sort of chef who makes small children cry?

But once we all started to eat, and the food did turn out well, as pasta and sausage tends to do, he seemed to reconsider, and his mom figured out that what he was objecting to was not the sauce or the pasta per se, but the lumps of tomato. Once those were extracted, he happily devoured all before him.

The lesson here is never fall for a child's tears when it comes to pasta.

How do you trick a small child into eating things that look weird? And after that battle, what gin-related cocktails do you prefer?