In which I get crabs*
*Haha! See what I did there? That will be the last STI-related joke I make in this blog.
My girlfriend and I went to the Washington D.C. area to visit a couple of friends this weekend. It was a great time and good company, though it turns out it's surprisingly hard to find things to do in our nation's capital. I'm pretty sure the whole city is museums and monuments. If you've seen all the monuments, and are honest with yourself to acknowledge that more than one museum per day is horribly boring, that doesn't leave a lot left.
Well, unless you count D.C. United soccer games, but then not everybody is a fan of lousy soccer.
Anyway, I actually thought Baltimore was cooler than Washington D.C., at least on this visit. We wandered around the Inner Harbor, we visited the Baltimore Aquarium, we checked out Geppi's Entertainment Museum (surprisingly awesome!). And we ate some crabs, because that's what you do.
My girlfriend, Jess, grew up in the Baltimore area, and she was raised on these things. If we were going near her hometown, she insisted, there better be steamed crabs, preferably served up in a divey establishment with brown paper tablecloths.
So it was that we ended up at Gunning's Seafood Restaurant, in their new Hanover location. Frankly, if this place is their sparkling new home, I wouldn't have felt comfortable eating at the old one. But it was suitably divey, appropriately stinky, and featured those brown paper tablecloths. Most importantly, if you were willing to share out a little money, they would bring you a giant skillet of steamed crabs, red eyes still glistening brightly, absolutely doused -- nay, drenched -- in Old Bay seasoning.
Our waitress was exactly the person you would expect to be working in a divey Baltimore seafood restaurant. She was the sort of haggard middle-aged woman that you would call "grizzled" if only she was a man. When I asked her how many crabs I should order, she said, "I can put away six in a sitting. I bet you can't handle more than three."
When the crabs arrived, I plopped the first one down in front of me. They don't give you plates, so you just drop it on the paper tablecloth. I expected one of those fancy leg-cracking tools, but all I got was a plastic knife and a mallet. I held them uncertainly, staring at my crab as it gazed back at me. I gave it a light swat on the shell, but it didn't seem to be fazed. In fact, I'm pretty sure it snapped its claws in amusement. So I reared back, smashed the thing over the head with all my might, and splattered bits of shell on my friend sitting across from me.
For those of you that were unaware, as I was, a crab is full of yellow goo. Is that edible? Well, google would tell me later that it is the crab's hepatopancreas, considered a delicacy by some and a concentration of the body's toxins by others (namely scientists). At the time, I had no clue what that stuff was.** And as it turns out, Jess, my resident crab expert, didn't remember a thing.
**Let's be honest, based on that definition I gave you, I still have no idea what it is.
We asked out waitress how to eat the crab, and she grabbed one, made a few swift twists, and left a pile of crab meat in front of us. Then she left, and we tried to figure out what the heck she had just done. I think she performed the Vulcan Death Grip on that crab. When I tried to recreate it, I just ended up with shards of shell embedded in my hands and yellow goo on my pants.
Eventually, we figured out how to pry the top part of the shell off. With that done, we could just kind of thwack it with the mallet for a while and eventually get a little bit of meat to eat. After six crabs apiece, and over an hour of hammering, we were more or less full (although most of what we ate might have been Old Bay).
I wouldn't say our waitress was impressed, but she didn't seem disgusted by us.
And you know what? It was pretty good. But there are a lot of ways to eat crabs that don't involve quite so much manual labor, and they're equally delicious. Next time, I think I'll get the crab cakes.
My girlfriend and I went to the Washington D.C. area to visit a couple of friends this weekend. It was a great time and good company, though it turns out it's surprisingly hard to find things to do in our nation's capital. I'm pretty sure the whole city is museums and monuments. If you've seen all the monuments, and are honest with yourself to acknowledge that more than one museum per day is horribly boring, that doesn't leave a lot left.
Well, unless you count D.C. United soccer games, but then not everybody is a fan of lousy soccer.
Anyway, I actually thought Baltimore was cooler than Washington D.C., at least on this visit. We wandered around the Inner Harbor, we visited the Baltimore Aquarium, we checked out Geppi's Entertainment Museum (surprisingly awesome!). And we ate some crabs, because that's what you do.
My girlfriend, Jess, grew up in the Baltimore area, and she was raised on these things. If we were going near her hometown, she insisted, there better be steamed crabs, preferably served up in a divey establishment with brown paper tablecloths.
So it was that we ended up at Gunning's Seafood Restaurant, in their new Hanover location. Frankly, if this place is their sparkling new home, I wouldn't have felt comfortable eating at the old one. But it was suitably divey, appropriately stinky, and featured those brown paper tablecloths. Most importantly, if you were willing to share out a little money, they would bring you a giant skillet of steamed crabs, red eyes still glistening brightly, absolutely doused -- nay, drenched -- in Old Bay seasoning.
Our waitress was exactly the person you would expect to be working in a divey Baltimore seafood restaurant. She was the sort of haggard middle-aged woman that you would call "grizzled" if only she was a man. When I asked her how many crabs I should order, she said, "I can put away six in a sitting. I bet you can't handle more than three."
When the crabs arrived, I plopped the first one down in front of me. They don't give you plates, so you just drop it on the paper tablecloth. I expected one of those fancy leg-cracking tools, but all I got was a plastic knife and a mallet. I held them uncertainly, staring at my crab as it gazed back at me. I gave it a light swat on the shell, but it didn't seem to be fazed. In fact, I'm pretty sure it snapped its claws in amusement. So I reared back, smashed the thing over the head with all my might, and splattered bits of shell on my friend sitting across from me.
For those of you that were unaware, as I was, a crab is full of yellow goo. Is that edible? Well, google would tell me later that it is the crab's hepatopancreas, considered a delicacy by some and a concentration of the body's toxins by others (namely scientists). At the time, I had no clue what that stuff was.** And as it turns out, Jess, my resident crab expert, didn't remember a thing.
**Let's be honest, based on that definition I gave you, I still have no idea what it is.
We asked out waitress how to eat the crab, and she grabbed one, made a few swift twists, and left a pile of crab meat in front of us. Then she left, and we tried to figure out what the heck she had just done. I think she performed the Vulcan Death Grip on that crab. When I tried to recreate it, I just ended up with shards of shell embedded in my hands and yellow goo on my pants.
Eventually, we figured out how to pry the top part of the shell off. With that done, we could just kind of thwack it with the mallet for a while and eventually get a little bit of meat to eat. After six crabs apiece, and over an hour of hammering, we were more or less full (although most of what we ate might have been Old Bay).
I wouldn't say our waitress was impressed, but she didn't seem disgusted by us.
And you know what? It was pretty good. But there are a lot of ways to eat crabs that don't involve quite so much manual labor, and they're equally delicious. Next time, I think I'll get the crab cakes.