Crabby

Our son likes crabs so a few weeks ago, we went to Chickie and Pete’s so he could eat some. There was a slight snag: He wasn’t sure how to crack open the claws so we had to show him how. Given that one dad is vegetarian and the other dad really doesn’t like shellfish, this quickly devolved into a comedy routine. What the hell did we know about eating crabs?

I have just never liked crabs. Crab might be OK—like if it’s meat served to me in crab cake form or something, and I can’t get out of eating it in a social situation, I might eat it. A crab is not OK, not even a little. The thought of cracking open crab claws and prying out the meat just repels me. If someone insisted I crack open a crab, I would call whatever emergency hotline allows you to quickly convert to Orthodox Judaism so I could get out of it. (I’m also not too hot on shrimp or lobster.)

I looked at the menu for Chickie and Pete’s, with a picture of a big pile of crabs with all their gag little heads and gulp claws and stuff and I thought, “That’s not food.” Enjoy these crustaceans if you want but I just … no. I can’t.

I did a little claw cracking but Steve did most of the work, winning Father of the Year as a vegetarian showing his son how to tear apart a crustacean. He grabbed the claws, touching those little hukk hukk hukk bumps or whatever are all over them and used that metal thingie to break the legs waaaaauuuugh and expose the meat and that little piece of bleaarrrggh white tendon or whatever.

At least he didn’t order those whole crabs, the kind where you have to crack open the head HUUUAAAAAGGGHHHH to get the meat out.

The good thing is, he ate all the crabs. We weren’t sure how much he would eat and it’s not like the two of us would eat the leftovers. So it wasn’t $20-something wasted. Plus, my wings were delicious!