Got Crabs

When E and I first bought Xanadu, we were really looking forward to crabbing in our backyard. After talking to a bunch of folks about it, however, we got a little discouraged as they complained about how bad crabbing was and how you couldn't catch anything. Since the house didn't close until October, we didn't think about it again until this summer.

E's parents came up to spend a month at Xanadu and we visited every weekend. One fine Sunday, we got a wild hair and decided to take our neighbor's crab pot out for a test drive. I went through the freezer and grabbed anything that I could find that looked at all freezer burnt so ended up with a random assortment of bait: turkey bacon, some apple sausages, a sirloin steak, and some flounder bits. We threw it all in the bait box and rowed the Port-a-Boat that Roger gave us as one of our housewarming gifts out a hundred feet from our beach and dropped the pot.

We took a long walk on the beach so that the pot could soak for a hour or so and then we took the boat back out. Given what we had heard from others and since we had absolutely no experience, we had pretty low expectations. Imagine our excitement then when we pulled the pot up to find two crabs hanging out in it! Roger gently pried the two crabs out of the pot with our 16 inch BBQ tongs and dropped them in a bucket. Now I had done some research on the matter (of course!), so I knew that both of the crabs were of the red rock variety and not dungeness. (The claws of a red rock crab are black while those of a dungeness are white.) Nevertheless, we were stoked.

Roger was in charge of cleaning and cooking the crab. First, however, he had to get them into the house. He explained that if you grabbed the crab from behind (the opposite end of the eyes), it wouldn't be able to get to you, but he was on his own there.

Once he got them inside, Roger set a big pot of water to boil and seasoned it with some spices. Once the water was good and ready, he grabbed the crabs and chucked them in the pot. They didn't go down without a fight though, and desperately clung onto the tongs with their big ass pincers, but into the pot they went. After a 15 minute boil, Roger dropped them into a sinkful of cold water to stop the cooking process. We then cleaned them thoroughly, clarified some butter, tied bibs around our necks and proceeded to chow down. Oh yeah.