Crabby, Crabbing, *Crabbed.

Have you ever been on the beach and noticed small crabs scurrying across the pale sand?    The one's I've seen are usually white and not very big but they love to scurry and when in danger, they bury themselves in sand.  I think I mentioned many months ago that my brothers would capture these and store them in the freezer complete with sand attached to their bodies.  My mother really hated it when they did that because she had to clean all the sand out of the freezer.

Those crabs are not edible and even if they were, I wouldn't eat them!  The crabs most people eat, tend to live further out.  I know you can make crab cakes out of them or eat them in a fancy way such as black pepper crab, crab chowder, crab salad. 

Most of the time I've eaten crab, its been cooked in boiling water, then drenched in plain melted butter so its really messy to eat.  You open the hard protective shell using a nut cracker, those metal ones you find in your misc drawers in the kitchen.  The drawer, you shove stuff in that you don't know where else to put.  The crab is usually hot, perfectly cooked and sooooo mmmmm that it melts in your mouth.

Most people buy the crab at a market, take it home and cook it.  If you are like my brothers and you live in a fishing town,  you just pop your boat, going out and checking your friends crab pots until you've found enough for dinner. 

When I lived on Diomede, crabbing was the big activity in the spring when the daylight got longer and it was warmer but there was still thick ice between Little Diomede and Big Diomede.  Out there, they did'nt use crab pots.  They caught crabs using a twisted rope decorated with large beads!  They tied strands of beads down towards the bottom of the rope.  When the rope was dropped through a hole in the ice, the beads would capture the crabs attention and the crabs would start climbing to rope only to get caught in the area between the strands of rope.

They pulled the rope up out of the hole, plucked the crabs off, threw them in a bucket and when they  caught enough crabs, they went in and cooked them.   Of course, the only real way they served crab with enough butter to have a beautiful mess on you and the table when done.  Talk about a memorable experience!

*Crabbed is a real word.  It means illegible handwriting.