織紙 - Letters from Olivia: Feeling crabby

The picture below should give you a good indication of the mood present in the Origami home yesterday evening:

K-chan's Japanese surfing buddy, T-san, has himself a BC shellfish fishing license. Apparently this allows him to harvest clams, mussels, shrimp, crab and all other delightful crusteceanous creatures of the sea. He gave us a call yesterday to say that he had been up to visit his traps in Sidney and would we like a couple of crabs for dinner? Ummmm....sure? While K-chan's Japanese heritage kicked in, leaving him quivering in anticipation of fresh, still crawling, seafood , I broke out into a cold sweat while Googling "how to cook live crabs", imagining the slaughter taking place in our kitchen a few hours hence.

I have to say it all went remarkably well. I discovered that the most humane thing to do is to put the lil' crabbers on ice, in the freezer for 30 mins to kind of anethetize them and then drop them into a pot of boiling salted water. The crab won't know what hit him and less wrestling into the pot for the cook (apparently when crabs get scared they adopt a wings-spread, claws-out pose which makes it harder for the chef (physically and emotionally, I suppose) to get them into the pot).

Here's Kaion getting crabby with a chilled one:

So, after Kaion's first lesson about where our food comes from, we sat down to enjoy the feast:

In addition to the crab, we had some warabi, a kind of wild plant that T-san and his wife had picked while out hiking. It's quite common in Japan in the spring, and apparently grows here as a native plant, too. I blanched it and we ate some pretty much as is, just dipping it into mayo. I also made a bit of a rice-topping dish with it, chopping it up and mixing it with mayo, wasabi, bonito flakes and a touch of soy sauce. Yum. We had some accompaniments for the crab like limes for squeezing and soy sauce for dipping but the meat itself was so good that we pretty much just ate it straight out of the shell.

Kenichi commented that it was nice to have such a leisurely meal - we were at the table nearly an hour, and actually drank a full glass of wine and got some adult convo in. A rarity with a short-attention spanned toddler who usually starts flinging food at the 15-minute mark. Although Kaion couldn't eat the crab (shellfish is a no-no for babies until at least around 2 y.o.) I think he was a bit mesmerized watching us cracking the shells and pulling the meat out and kept himself busy with some of the leftovers:

I guess this is one instance where I can say that this crabby baby is actually quite sweet.