Wednesday, January 30, 2008

CRABS! (part 2)

Allright, I'm blogging right now cause I'm bored and procrastinating. Sure, I have a ton of projects to work on, but it's raining out and I just can't motivate. So let me tell you about our crab cooking adventure (part 2). Now as you may remember Tom and I tried to cook crabs last year. We had bought rock crabs from Super 88, but that fiasco didn't turn out too well. Our second attempt was much better, and a clear indicator that we'd learned some lessons from the first time.

So I hadn't actually planned on buying live crabs. It is Dungeness crab season up here in the Bay Area, so there have been lots of posters around the Berkeley Marina advertising live and cooked crabs. Since my little cousin was in town, I thought it'd be fun to head down there and buy some cooked crabs for dinner. Unfortunately, it was a really foggy day, so when we arrived at the Marina, you couldn't even see the water.

The place I had in mind to buy crabs was the Marina Sports fishing center, but we couldn't really locate it. In an attempt to find it, we went to the dock master's office, where I asked for the bait shop. (I had asked for the wrong thing and turns out the bait shop was closed). So I asked him where I could find crabs. So he opened the door behind him and shouted out to a boat that was docked there and found that one of the boats had just come in with crabs, so he told me to go out and buy some. That really wasn't what I was expecting, but he was standing there watching me, so I wasn't about to say I wanted cooked crabs. I hurried out the back door with Tom and my cousin in tow and approached the boat where two men were sorting crabs. He told me they were only $8 each!! so I said I'd buy 4 of them. He just stuck them in a big trash bag and when he handed them to me, I almost dropped the bag, cause they were so heavy.

So now we had 4 big crabs to cook. We made a little stop to buy some crab cracking gear and then headed home to cook them. I looked for some online guidance on how to cook and clean the crabs, but basically left the cooking up to Tom. I was a little scared of the crabs because they were quite large, lively and cause we'd gotten them fresh, they didn't have those little rubber bans on their claws, so they were all thrashing around. Here's a pic of the crabs in the fancy trash bag:

Next we boiled them two at a time in one big metal pot. Our whole entire house ended up smelling like crab and brine.
And here we are with our beautifully cooked crabs. You can really tell how huge they are in this pic.

We ended up taking two crabs over to my cousin's house for dinner and leaving two for ourselves. And really, they were so large that I'm completely crabbed out. I don't think I'll be eating crabs for quite some time. But for those of you who may want to visit, Oakland is having its annual crabfest on March 1st.

No comments: