Thursday, May 31, 2012

Crabs! Crabs! Crabs! c/o The Crackpot

After our first day of races, my father had long hoped we would go get crabs. In fact, our cousin V. had made a reservation at one place for that explicit purpose. But then my father read about another place and we made a slight change to the location and ended up at The Crackpot. There was a bit of confusion upon our arrival in as far as they didn't have any record of our reservation, but they quickly put a table together and we got down to the business at hand. Our server was a friendly dude generally undaunted by our myriad requests. Most all of us enjoyed half cream of crab, half Maryland crab soup. The overall opinion was that it was good to do the half and half. I love me cream and fat, that's no lie, but a full cup of the cream of crab might have been overdoing it, even for me. But the mix between the cream-based soup and the more tomato-based version, well, it worked and evened out nicely.
Then we got down to crabs. I think we ordered a few dozen? I can't really remember the last time I sat at a table with others and just ripped into a pile of crabs, though I'd imagine it would have been in Maryland in my backyard or the backyard of D. and B.  CP and I enjoyed the 'dumps' at Oyster House, but that was a negligible amount of crab compared to this. I feared I wouldn't remember how to get to the gold mine of crab in the carapace (correct word?) of the crab...but that was a fear quickly unfounded by the dexterity and audacity of my fingers.
Of course there are no photographs of this efficiency due to the fact that my fingers were absolutely crusted with Old Bay, making it difficult to pick up a camera without accidentally giving it the look of a crab...and I certainly didn't want anyone to mistakenly take a mallet to my camera.
These crabs weren't from Maryland. They were from the Gulf. Still entirely tasty and enjoyable. I was almost as taken with the detritus and remnants of our feast as I was of the actual crabs. We also had corn, which honestly was a little lacking as far as taste and look. Anemic corn.
My pile.
A lovely and fun meal. Thanks goes to my father!

1 comment:

nc catherine said...

AH CRABS!!! I waited til the next to last day of my B'more trip last summer to whine and beg for crabs! We ate them, in the July heat, but on a deck of a restaurant/dive on the outer inner harbor. Totally scrumptious, totally sticker shock to read what they were per dozen. And we ate some serious dozens yes we did!!

Long gone are the days of yore at Jimmy Cantlers somewhere south of the Bay Bridge on a waterway where all ya could eat softshell steamers and crabs held sway. Steamers, wow do they even exist on menus nowadays???

Probably good for the species that they are pricey. Sadness for the humans who love whacking them and eating them. Looks like an awesome time no matter!