I got Crabs

and I love them!  This is my favorite time of year I have to say.  I am a crab fiend I must say.  I can’t get enough of them and at least 3 or 4 times a year I head up to “HillTop” in Pa for their AYCE deal that honestly is the best thing going, if you can eat 18 or more crabs in one sitting.  I can, I do and I love it!

I don’t want to say that I have a favorite child but I will say that I do have one daughter that takes after my passion for picking crabs.  One of my daughters took the Lazy excuse and I still love her, but I don’t know if I can forgive her for it.

(insert 12 year old whiney voice here on 1, 2 andddddd 3) “Ittttt takkesss tooooo long to pickkkkk themmmmm”

 UGH, get away from me with such language child!  Blasphemy!

My other daughter is on the fence and sits and picks but not nearly as long as my favorite, dang, other daughter.  She is the apple of my eye, a true Donvitia in the making.  When she sits down to pick crabs I do assist but, in the way my dad taught me.   I don’t pick them for her anymore.  She needs to learn how to do it her self.  My father’s technique works the best.  Pick threw the childs pile and berate them for wasting crab.  Yep, shame works in the Catholic church and it is no substitute when it comes to crab picking.  “Look! LOOK!, what are you doing?  You missed all THIS MEAT, right here.  Now slow down and pick the meat better before you get another crab. Look, right here, do you see that?  That is all good meat, here too, do you see that, come on, you can do better than that.  I know you can…” (a little positive reinforcement doesn’t hurt either)

Now the trick is that while you are showing the child what meat she has missed you must eat that meat and only give her a little of it.  You must berate and shovel the meat into your own mouth.  The child surely wants that meat, but isn’t getting it.  Personally I think that is the touch that does it on top of the berating.  It is one thing to berate, but to not get to eat the meat, man that is hard to handle.  Perhaps handing her a little to see what she has missed is good to do to, but not too much for she might think you will pick for her if she doesn’t do well.  By you eating the spoils of her rushing, that will teach the child to do a better job on the next crab….IMO of course. 

Now, the other reason I fell in love with my wife besides the fact she stalked me due to my delawares hottest blogger, is that she share smy passion for the Callinectes sapidus,.  My wife is an Eastern Shore girl with a grandfather that was a waterman and a poppop that has his house and farm right on the Choptank river.  She has it in her blood and her family essentially grew up on seafood. Yes, my wife has crabs in her.

To give you an example of what it is like with her family last weekend we went down to visit her parents.  Saturday morning we went out on their boat and boated around the Choptank River area. As we were boating around we came across her father’s brother. You guessed it. He was Crabbing.  Cigarette in mouth, pulling up his “trout line” there he was floating along.  He had caught about a bushel that morning, but “they fell off about 8:30 and haven’t had much since.”  AWESOME! It just doesn’t get any better than this.  The whole boating thing is cool too, but that is another post in and of itself. 

To digress though, her father learned how to boat before he drove.  He knows the tributaries like the back of his hand.  He knows where the sand bars are, where so and so got hurt back in high school, where this is, where that happened, whose farm that is and on and on. It is great to go boating…annnnyyywhhoooo. 

Some people love having a beer with the crabs I wont lie and say that I don’t.  I like a coke.  The fiz goes perfect with the old bay flavor that has marinated your mouth after having eaten a half dozen.  The coke for some reason quenches my thirst much better than any beer can.  The beer has to be ICE cold to fully enjoy when eating a crab, and no matter how cold you try to keep the beer it just doesn’t stay cold enough for me.  Besides, beer fills yiou up. I can get a beer all year round, I can get a Md Blue crab but only a part of the year. Life is all about choices and the opportunity cost of a crab without a beer is a no brainer.

Next weekend we are heading back down to the in-laws to attend a seafood feast that I think is in Cambridge, Md.  $25 all you can eat (ayce).  You really can’t beat that price. A dozen clams is $5, a 1/2 lb of shrimp is $5 and a dozen crabs is like $20.  I can gorge myself and still stay a hottie. And no doubt that $25 fee will be easily taken advantage of. I will make sure that I also eat my wifes fare share, she will pansy out and complain about how “full” she is I’m sure. I can’t wait to scarf down shrimp, oysters, clams and crabs!  Short of having sex at the same time I don’t know what could be better than a seafood feast?  To be honest the older I get I think I might be ok with beaing able to have seafood when ever I wanted it. 

So for all you people that don’t know how to pick crabs I have youtube below of how to do it.

Please, when you are around me don’t ever bitch about how long it takes to get the meat and how they don’t “fill you up”.  That is the point, sit around a table, shooting the shit for a few hours, picking crabs, swating flies and hoping that next year, the crabs are as good….eventually you fill up on them. But if you take the time to enjoy yourself you may find that you also get your fill of good conversation and a chance to remember last years story or the year before that’s story and even your Dad’s story about how this one time, he was in the Bakery in Little Italy in the 50’s and a guy came running in to use the phone.  The guy behind the counter pulled out a knife and said he could try but no one uses his phone, he had to get past him and his two Dobermans if he wanted to use the phone.

The guy was bleeding to death from a razor cut to his neck by his girlfriend.  My dad was 11, the owner was Italian and rules are rules….the guy never got to use the phone either. That makes the crabs that much better when you hear stories like that.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSSUePEtUdI]

Personally I take all the legs off before I pop the lid, but to each their own I guess. I also eat some of the brains and stuff, slurp! damn good!