Most Americans have been to Red Lobster, Joe’s Crab Shack or some of these other chains. Based on what region of the country you live in, crab mean different things to different people. Blue, King, or Dungeness crab, I have had them all. And personally, I thing the Dungeness is the best of them all. Sure, it is a lot less work to breakdown king crab but to me the meat is bland (and not worth the effort). It is another reason that you typically eat it with butter because it needs more flavor.

Quality food is best handled with simple treatment. I love Indian food and heavy spices. In that case, I think the recipes are showcasing the spices more so than the ingredients. Even in the case of crab cakes, I tend to make them when the meat starts to get a little fishy. A few nights ago, I made Fettuccini Alfredo and just sprinkled the crab on top. Even then, I think the parmesan overpowered the crab and to do it again, I would probably use olive oil and Italian seasoning with the crab.

I want to focus on the crab today, so I am not going to talk about how to make alfredo or boil pasta. But suffice to say, it is really easy.

I start with the legs. Break them off from the carcass and split the shell. If you are careful, you can get whole segments out as you work down the leg. I use a specialized shell cracker, but I have also used a nut cracker and also pliers to do this job.

Once the legs are done, turn to the body of the crab. This is called lump meat and it is not nearly as sweet as the legs. If you have a lot of them to shell, then you might want to separate for different uses. But essentially, you break the body apart and pick out all of the meat. Avoid the mustardy looking stuff called ‘crab butter’ it is edible, but not tasty. I try to rinse all of that off before I start shelling.

My wife snuck one crab while I wasn’t looking so one crab yielded about 1 cup of meat. If you think about it, this took one day and $54 in rental and license fees to yield 1 cup of crab meat. You bet it deserves special treatment for all of that effort.

I will take one detour before I finish today. I heard probably the best discussions on food and culture over the weekend. It was an interview with Wade Truong of Elevated Wild on the Orvis Hunting and Shooting Podcast. One of the sentient questions I took away was ‘How can we possibly value food when we can have anything we want, whenever we want show up in our doorstep in a bag?’.

I don’t think every meal has to be an affair, I think that there is a place to just getting it done (see yesterday for more of my thoughts on that). However I think that there are too many people that have no connection to hunting/gathering/growing food whatsoever. There are certain emotions that are related to killing something. It is a combination of sadness, disgust, reverence, gratefulness and jubilation at the same time. That is a connection with our humanity.

End Your Programming Routine: I had a good run with this trip to the coast last weekend, I will be moving on tomorrow. Clearly, it was a good experience since I wrote so much about it over the last three days. The two points I was trying to get across today were 1) treat quality ingredients simply and 2) look for ways to reconnect to humanity. If you cant (or wont) hunt or fish at least cook. Treat ingredients with the respect that they deserve.