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High-Crab Dinners

Someone remembered to pack his angry eyes Over the last couple of years, low-crab diets have been all the rage. Every product under the sun now seems to have a low-crab version. Who knew tortillas had crabs in them to begin with?

Frankly I don't get it. Why demonize this crustacean? Crabs and their kin have fed humanity for probably a thousand million years. It just goes to show how silly people can be. Melissa and I decided to thumb our nose at low-crab zealots and do a series of high-crab dinners.

In addition to sounding a note of defiance, these dinners gave me a chance to exercise my "stretching leftovers" skills. In some ways, this is my favorite kind of cooking. It's challenging to reinvent leftovers so that each new dish is different than the one before, and it's more exciting for the diner, who isn't forced to eat the vaguely unpleasant reheated leftovers from the previous night. American willingness to eat food like this comes from our collective attitude that food is simply fuel. We go through our meals by rote, chewing mindlessly and swallowing down something not very good. That attitude chips away at our souls, leaving us with a hollow-eyed acceptance of uninteresting dinners and a lack of sensual awareness. Not in our household, though!

We started with the beast itself, a 2 1/4 pound Dungeness crab. I made sure to get a feisty one from the fish market, since I wanted one that was still alive and healthy. I got what I wanted; he moved his legs about energetically as I removed him from the paper and prepared to put him in the pot. Tongs and grim determination won the day.

After I removed him from the boiling pit into which I had callously thrown him, I prepared him simply: take off the top shell, clean out the "dead mans' fingers" and other "delicacies", turn the crab over and dismantle the "breast bone", cut down the middle with poultry shears and then cut between each leg. Serve with melted butter. We had wine with this, but you won't hear about it until Wine Blogging Wednesday 5. Melissa and I got to talk quite a bit as we worked the meat out of the crab shell, which made for a pleasurable meal. Have this experience while you can; the crab season might end earlier than expected.

Mr. Sweetpea tries to use his Jedi mind powers to force us to drop crab. We didn't finish all the crab, so I cleaned the rest of it and saved the half cup of meat for the second high-crab dinner.

The next night, I came home and made a crab stock from the cleaned shell. This is straightforward: break up the shell into medium-size chunks, cook at the barest of boils for an hour and a half with mirepoix. Strain.

The crab stock formed the liquid base for a risotto I served with steamed fennel. I finished the risotto with some taleggio, the crab meat from the previous night, and a chunk of the crab butter I made earlier this year. I've recently gravitated more towards Tom's risotto technique. We had similar techniques already, but he adds liquid more aggressively and ends up with a creamier final dish. The risotto came out nicely, but next time I might reduce the amount of taleggio. The crab and cheese were well balanced, but I wanted more crab flavor.

With this dinner, we drank the 1998 Trittenheimer Altärchen Riesling Spatlese from Weingut Ernst Clüsserath. This wine's muted smells of petrol, apple, pepper and nutmeg gave no indication of the bold flavor. Sipping this wine was like biting into a tart green apple, one that has you licking your lips and slurping up the juice on your chin even as its acidity sends a little frisson down your spine. It had a nice weight and viscosity, and oddly it brought out the cheese in the risotto.

We didn't manage to eat all the risotto, so I put the leftovers in the refrigerator. Two days later on Christmas at Melissa's parents' house, I used the risotto to make arancine—balls of risotto that are breaded and deep fried and served as an appetizer.

So there you have it. Take that, low-crab fanatics!

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