you are truly a hero. A Spinal Tap reference could have gone unacknowledged if it wasn’t for you.

It’ll be cheaper if you buy the crab and cook it yourself. Anything frozen is already cooked, so all you really need to do is steam it until it’s warm enough to eat. (Which is why frozen tends to give you inferior results). It’s really easy, and one crab can feed two (with a salad or something on the side) so it makes a “I’ll cook for you” date meal that seems far more impressive than it actually is. Note that everybody gets messy eating crab out of the shell, and that should be a plus for a date too, though maybe not a first date.

You can buy dungeness live at the Pike Place Market but other places are cheaper (some of the bigger QFCs have them, and Uwajimaya always has a good selection). Cooking is about as basic as it gets: you get a pot big enough to submerge the crab, fill it up with water and some salt, get the water absolutely boiling, and then throw the crab in (grab it from above, along the sides of the shell above the legs). Yes, you literally boil it alive. Make sure your pot has a lid. (It may sound like it’s screaming, but that’s just the steam coming out of the shell — it dies quick). Cook it until it looks orange-red like a cooked crab should. (There’s a formula for time per pound that I’m sure you can find on the web). Then clean it — just pull the main shell away starting at the rear and wash away the gooey bits — and eat. There’s a fair bit of meat in the body, as well as the legs.

If you try crab at a restaurant it’s going to be expensive, but it’s a great “special occasion” meal as long as it’s a casual meal — shelling a crab is a messy business even if you know what you’re doing. Make sure you dine at a place that specializes in fresh seafood and doesn’t dress the crab up — you just want the animal cleaned in its shell and some butter to dip it in. McCormick & Schmick’s used to do a good crab dinner, but I haven’t been there in several years.

Also, winter is crab season — you’re not going to find fresh live crab in the summer (anything you find now has been frozen for at least a month). Local dungeness starts showing up about October (the Dungeness Crab Festival is the second weekend) and runs until about January; anything earlier than that is from Oregon or California; anything later is from Alaska. I often have it for Thanksgiving.

Say, having written all that, don’t the USSM authors count some kind of culinary genius among their august ranks?

Now six in a row,
is Hargrove starting to sweat
or am I wishing?