DUNGENESS CRAB, KING CRAB, TOMAHAWK STEAK
Californians stood in long lines lately just to get to the fish & meat counter at their fav market because they luv these holiday delights. But they're also top choices for other special occasions
In my family, New Year’s Eve has been the time for jumbo king crab legs, with their sweet-mild-flavor resembling the taste of lobster, all the way back to the 1980’s. We’d add to the meal a sweet-or-sour baguette, fresh-shucked oysters, steamed mussels, liver pâté, maybe even scallops. That was in Knoxville —the San Francisco of Tennessee, as I used to think of it for reasons I can barely remember. Well, now I’m living Walnut Creek in the East Bay, near Oakland which is a part of the real San Francisco Bay Area. And here they are crazy about Dungeness crab with its distinctly sweet, even nutty, flavor. It’s an utter seafood delight that matches —in my opinion— the subtle-sweet-salty flavor of Chesapeake Bay blue crabs of the East Coast. If you’re not up to the challenge of cracking your own, accommodating stores will do the work for you at three times the price of a whole cooked Dungeness.
A Book Recommendation
{Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay is a marvelous and captivating non-fiction book by William W. Warner about the Chesapeake Bay, blue crabs and watermen that I read while being stationed in Norfolk, Va., while I was in the U.S. Navy. The book takes its name from the generic name of the blue crab, Callinectes, which is Greek for "beautiful swimmer." It won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction.}