Food of the Gods

Notice the tools used to free the meat. The butter was melted and used as lubrication.

Last week Dianne advised me that the local Fred Myers was having a sale on King Crab Legs. She stated that they were like $8.88 a pound. I believe that normally they are $2,398.92 an ounce, so this was a really good deal. We decided to get two pounds and see what happens. If we didn’t get incredibly ill, or start seeing things we would go back and get more. As it turns out, we would be making another trip before the day was out. Since then my favorite food has been changed to king crab legs. The problem is that I will only be able to afford them about once a year, or whenever they go on sale. In any case, getting to the meat was almost as much fun as eating it.

Just looking at the enormous crustaceans was rather intimidating, but I had the power of boiling water, hot melted butter, and several large hand tools on my side. After heating up the spiny crustaceans, we got to work on de-Skeletonizing the little devil. The legs were relatively easy to crack. The meat flowed freely from its thorny confines in enormous chunks. It was soaked in warm melted butter and eaten with revelry. The claws were a whole different matter altogether. Although they were even more flavorful than the legs, they required a Herculean effort to extract from their shells. After realizing that they were not going to yield to bending or even a wack on the counter, I pulled out the big tools. A pair of channel lock pliers made short work of the shell. Some would argue that the correct technique would be to use the back side of a knife with a sharp wack to the claws. I disagree. Just the feeling of raw power holding a set of pliers about to crack open a crab leg is justification enough for the overkill. Besides, it was quite effective, and very fun. Dianne was somewhat concerned about the fact that I did not wash the pliers, or even wipe off the light oil film that was still on them, but once she tasted the sweet meat, she understood why I had chosen not to sterilize the cracking instruments. Well, that and the fact that the oil seemed to add a little flavor…