Whole Foods Dungeness

I didn’t eat shellfish for most of my life due to religious reasons, so you can only imagine how exciting it is to me now that I've abandoned those particular commandments. While I’ve since become comfortable with simple recipes, I’m still inexperienced with such basics as how to eat a crab. But when I saw cooked, cracked, whole Dungeness crab at Whole Foods for $7.95 a pound, I figured it would be a good intro. It was, tossed with broccoli rabe in oil and butter, black pepper, sea salt and served on pasta with raw garlic grated atop. I wish more restaurants offered that instead of parmesan.

I know you should cook a crab yourself, but plenty of juices still ran out of this one as I cracked the pieces over the pasta. Crab meat is so delicate once it's been removed, but serving it in hunks of shell gave this dish a rough appeal. Cracking the shell and digging out the meat with the butt of a fork and my own teeth, I couldn’t help but feel like that early human ancestor who first ate a cooked crab. Hopefully it was resting in a seaside patch of wild garlic and primitive rabe when the lightening struck.