Crab attack!

We bought blue-craw crabs this weekend (2 dozen mediums for $8!) while out on Long Island.

Dear deciding which crab to clean next

We (more like Dear, who are we kidding?) sorta stopped up the sink so that the crabs could have one last swim. They were kinda cute crawling all over each other and flipping themselves over. We thought (for about a minute) about keeping some as pets.

This guy (yes, they were all male crabs) lost his claw but you could see a new one growing (left side of photo); check out the ferociousness of his full-sized claw! After seeing that the claws could re-generate, I toyed again with the idea of keeping a few as pets and ripping out their claws once in a while. :D Too bad the claw meat is not the most delicious part of the blue crab....

Cleaned crabs -- do they know what lies in store for them?

I moved too slow to capture a pic of the crabs in the steaming pot, but it basically looks like the above. One ornery fellow managed to jump out of the wok, onto the floor. Not sure if that killed him or not but he snapped his claw off. I quickly picked him up, rinsed him off and threw him in. Dear put chopped scallions and julienned ginger on top -- very simple. In just a few minutes, we were ready to eat!

Yummy!

I laid down newspaper on the table for easy clean up (no, we did not eat off the newspapers, as we saw is the custom in Maryland).

Tools of the trade

Since we got home late, we didn't start eating until 9 or so. It took about 3 hours to finish up but that meat was so sweet, juicy, and delicious! Dear realized that he has an upcoming appointment for bloodwork and was concerned about his cholestrol so he just ate a few and removed all the meat from the rest of the crabs so that he could make crab cakes! Poor Dear -- it took him forever to take out what amounts to less than a pound of lump crab meat. :( After a while, the mallet (for the claws) was causing too much noise so Dear switched to a nutcracker, which I think is a more effective method anyway. It was much harder to save the claw meat so I ended up eating about 12 of those at the end!

When cleaning up, I pondered saving the steaming liquid where all the juices from the crab had dripped down into, but refrained. That liquid must be so good though! I wonder if the liquid is more salvageable from a crab boil? I'd like to try that next but Dear is all about the steaming. :T