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.