Crab

I'll come right out and say it:  I love crab.  I always have, even as a child.  In fact, I have wonderful memories of my Grandpa Hank cleaning crabs and showing me how to use the little end of the claw as a pick to get the crab meat out of tight places.  Now I use a nutcracker and nutpick, but the method is just the same.  Every winter I look forward to crab season although now I get it from the grocery instead of Grandpa's house on the Oregon coast.  It still tastes great, though.  Yesterday there was Dungeness crab at the store.  I bought two of the prickly orange crustaceans and brought them home.  Paul and I stood at the sink and picked out all the luscious meat, laughing and talking and making a mess.  It's always more fun to clean crab with someone else to keep you company.  Last night we mixed it with some melted butter and finely chopped garlic and roasted it in the oven long enough to heat it up and cook the garlic a little.  We ate it with French bread and a salad of baby greens.  It was delicious.  Today I mixed the leftover crab with some mayonnaise, bread crumbs, chopped green onion, minced lemon peel, and a pinch of cayenne and formed it into crab cakes.  Oh, my!  Crab cakes might be my favorite way to eat crab.  However I fix it, crab always makes me think of my Grandpa Hank.  If he were still around, the one thing I would want to do with him is clean and eat some fresh crab.  They just go together in my mind.