The Horror...The Horror..

One of the three in this photo is not having a fun time (hint: it's the one without an Oscar)

There has been a considerable amount of research done about whether crustaceans feel pain or not. Is this actually under debate? When you stick a crab in a steam pot, I’m pretty sure the ensuing clanking is triggered by unmitigated agony and not because they’re dancing a jig. It’s one of the reasons I don’t like cooking crabs and lobsters; it’s never the yuk fest promised by Annie Hall. I want the death of the animals I eat to be as swift and painless as possible and I have yet to find a way to provide that for crustaceans. Chefs suggest freezing them, putting them in fresh water (a slow death that takes over 12 hours) or putting a knife through their heads. The latter method seemed to make the most sense and a few months ago, I tried it.

This sure as hell don't look humane.

I was making grilled lobster with herb butter so we split the lobsters from head to tail. The results were not convincing, probably because the brain halves were still connected to the body halves so the lobsters continued to twitch and squirm as I slathered their insides with butter. At least the dinner guests enjoyed the meal. Then I read about Simon Buckhaven, the Temple Grandin of shellfish. A few years ago, the English lawyer invented the horribly named, Crustastun, a metal bin that sends 110 volts through whatever you put into it – Dungeness crab, crayfish, spiny lobster, a large guinea pig – bringing about death within a couple seconds. Sounds great except the base model is the size of a Xerox machine and costs over $4,000.

It also plays a lilting lullaby right before they're zapped

Enter eBay, where you can get a pocket-sized rechargeable stun gun that delivers 2.7 million volts for under $20. So I did. This doesn’t mean that the stun gun has thousands of times the killing power of the Crustastun; stun guns only deliver milliamps where the Crustastun chamber hits its targets with 600 times the current (4-6 amps). My hope was that the delicate crustacean nervous system wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. I decided to name her "Mercy"

The day the post office delivered my instrument of death, I hightailed it over to the crazy Chinese market where they had stone crabs for a few bucks a pound. I took a couple of them home and then thought, “Oh shit. What do I do with them until killing time?” It’s not like I have a saltwater holding tank next to the sink. So I tossed them in the fridge and walked away, rationalizing to myself that they were napping peacefully. Yay, death with dignity!

I highly recommend using rubber gloves.

When it came to cooking time, I made sure the steam pot was hot and ready to go should the crabs survive their tasing. I took them out of the fridge and zapped each of them for a few seconds. The animals barely reacted despite the arcing current and tiny wisps of acrid smoke. After that, they seemed thoroughly and completely dead. Rather than do an autopsy, I tossed them in the pot where they cooked away soundlessly. Mission accomplished.

Now that’s what I call a dead crab

I made my friend shell the carcasses while I rolled out pasta and I made a green curry-like sauce substituting cream for coconut milk and tossed it all together with some corn and cilantro. My plating sucks

While stone crabs don’t yield as much meat as a Dungeness crab and they’re more of a pain to shell, they were nonetheless delicious and I didn’t have to shell squat (thanks, Steve). Boiled down with shrimp shells to a paste for a future bisque

Obviously, there is nothing scientific about my method and maybe it didn't even work. Maybe the tasing put the crabs into a state of paralyzing agony. But it seemed more humane than any method I've tried in the past. And since lobsters die from electrocution even more quickly than crab, I can't see why it wouldn't work on them, too.

My only regret is that I didn’t tase the giant shrimp I also cooked. They didn’t die as instantaneously in a hot pan as I thought they would. But if it’s any consolation, they might have been the best peel and eat shrimp I’ve ever eaten – tossed in a hot wok with ground pasilla and chipotle powder, cumin, sliced red jalapeno and garlic and salt. Sweet, spicy, sucked the heads...amazing. Sorry, shrimpses.

Out-Chef Chef Boyardee!

How can anything tasty fit in those itty-bitty things? I almost never order filled pastas at restaurants. Growing up eating dim sum and xiao long bao I’m used to a large ratio of filling to wrapper. Comparing shiu mai to a dinky tortellini is like comparing…something really juicy and delicious and pork-filled to something that isn’t. A menu item like Asiago pumpkin ravioli always sounds yummy and flavorful, but inevitably it just tastes like a wad of pasta because of a paucity of filling and too-thick pasta. Mozza gets it right The exceptions – like Mozza Osteria’s Fresh Ricotta & Egg Raviolo, whose filling includes an entire oozy egg yolk – are reminders that the problem with most filled pastas is in the execution, not the concept. So when I make ravioli, I don’t mess around. I don’t make them obscenely large or overstuffed but I don’t want people to say, “Uh, I think I can taste the mushrooms.” Fillings-wise, I’ll occasionally do the ricotta-based ravioli. It’s ricotta, some Parmesan, a pinch of nutmeg, sometimes parsley, and then whatever sexy foodstuff I have in mind: minced mushrooms, roasted butternut squash, chopped prosciutto, ground meat, etc. But I’m more inclined to fill it with just the sexy foodstuff. I’m a big fan of braised meats in ravioli, like shredded short ribs, or I’ll do seafood. Last night, it was crab. I’ve steamed and shelled my Dungeness crabs before, but it’s a huge pain in the ass. I have to drive a ways to get the live ones, then I have to go through the ordeal of cooking the poor little things and then it takes me a good hour to shell two crabs. It’s so much easier to walk down the street to Trader Joe’s, grab a one pound can of Chicken of the Sea claw meat and pop it open. Plus, it costs less than half as much and tastes almost as good. Blue swimming crab ain’t no Dungeness and its sustainability is in question, but we can't all be Alice frickin' Waters. I forked up the crab, added some green onions, red pepper, lemon zest and a little egg white, which probably isn’t necessary but I had it leftover from the salad dressing. And that’s it. I suppose it really doesn’t matter how you season it so long as the crab is good. Some sort of vegetable is helpful to add texture.Make sure it's the refrigerated kind I’ve retreated to my Asian roots and used gyoza wrappers for my ravioli many times but last night I was feeling show-offy and brought out my pasta roller. I had that thing for a couple years before I actually used it. It seemed like such a messy headache. But it’s actually a pretty easy and forgiving process. And my mess factor was greatly reduced once I got a pastry scraper. If you don’t have one, you should get one. Remember Steve Buscemi’s leg in Fargo? I’m no pasta expert and there are probably a thousand better instructions for making it but here’s how I do it. The basic ratio is 3 large eggs for every two cups of flour. You make a little well in the flour, crack your eggs in it, mix it with a fork while doing a mad dash to keep egg goo from dripping out the well and onto the floor. Eventually, you get a doughy ball that you start kneading to incorporate the rest of the flour. It’ll be hard and rough looking but that’s fine.Cut it in fourths (with your trusty pastry scraper) and start feeding it one of the fourths into your pasta machine (set at 1, the widest setting). It’ll come out ugly, but after you fold it and re-feed it, it will knead into something smooth and manageable. At that point, you feed the pasta through the machine a successively higher numbers on your pasta machine. By the end, you should have a long, wafer thin ribbon of pasta. For once, not cut with a dog food can Time is of the essence as the pasta will dry out and crack within a few minutes so you should have your filling close at hand. I use a pastry ring whose diameter is half the width of the pasta sheet but I’ve also used empty soup cans, dog food cans or whatever works. I lay out a strip of the pasta, put out spoonfuls of filling on the bottom half, using the pastry ring to space them apart. Then I wet the pasta around the filling with water (not egg wash) and fold the top half over. Press to seal the ravioli and cut ‘em out with the pastry ring. At this point, I take each one to check the seal and ensure there’s no air in the ravioli. Air pockets are bad. Then I layer the ravioli with parchment paper and store them in the freezer to keep them from getting mushy. If you store them for longer than a couple hours, make sure they're in an airtight container or they'll dry out and crack. Two cups of flour should make around 60-70 ravioli, which should match a one pound can of crab. Let them eat kibble I rarely sauce ravioli with marinara because tomatoes are pretty dominating. Browned butter is delicious but in small doses. I usually stick with broths or cream sauces so that the flavors in the filling can stand out. For the crab ravioli, I sautéed some shallots, added some cream and saffron, cut it with a little white wine, and cooked it until it turned yellow and fancy. I suppose you could strain it but I think the orange saffron strands are cool looking plus it lets everyone know that you used the real thing. Note the exquisite and rare saffron stamens Boiling the ravioli is a critical step. Once you put them in boiling water, you want to make sure it doesn’t boil violently or your ravioli will rip. A slow bubble works just fine. It should only take a couple minutes and then you plate, sauce and garnish. Or...open a can of this.

On Fish

Here are my rules on buying seafood: 1) Don't buy farmed salmon. Never mind that farmers frequently dye the flesh pink and most practices are bad for the environment. Farmed salmon tastes like crap. It’s mushy and bland and good for nothing. Wild salmon, while not perfect for the environment, is a world apart from the farmed crap. Just look at Copper River salmon next to a fillet of pale and floppy farm stuff and you wouldn’t think they were from the same planet, let alone species. Don’t even get me started on the taste difference. Coho, Sockeye, Copper River, King – I’ll eat them all. 2) Never buy farmed shrimp. That’s just because of the environment. 3) Steaming your own live crab is far superior than buying the precooked stuff. It’s not even worth it to buy the precooked stuff. I’ll either buy the refrigerated canned crab from Southeast Asia or I’ll steam my own Dungeness crab. It’s a pain in the ass to shell it and it’s no fun dumping those poor little crustaceans into the Pot of Death but it’s one of my top ten foods. The sound of crab claws banging against the pot can be haunting. “Tell me, Clarice. Have the crabs stopped clanking?” 4) Buy fresh local stuff whenever possible (tough luck, Kansas) or, if not, buy flash frozen stuff. A lot of seafood is sold defrosted. You just don’t know when they did it. Could’ve been that morning, could’ve been last Tuesday. Luckily, recent USDA laws make it mandatory for sellers to specify the fish’s country of origin and whether it’s fresh or frozen. 5) Not all farmed seafood is bad. Farmed oysters are benign. Vegetarian fed fish like catfish and tilapia aren’t terrible, though they’re often fed corn. Is industrial corn worse than overfishing? Vegetarianism is sounding better and better. 6) Above all, avoid escolar. Why? I’m glad you asked. Now, I love the succulent fish. The kind whose flesh is on the fatty side; it can be like the Kobe beef of the sea. It tastes decadent and it’s easy to cook; it’s almost impossible to overcook. But since Chilean sea bass hit the top of the unsafe list and sablefish, or what my people call “black cod,” is kinda pricey, what’s there to eat? So when the dude at Fish King said that escolar was like Chilean sea bass and it was under ten bucks a pound, I pounced on it. I had John and Ole over for dinner where I served fillets with a watercress pesto. During dinner, we all were freaking out on how amazing the texture of the fish was and how odd it was that we’d never even heard of escolar before.

Watercress Pesto 2 big handfuls of watercress 2 garlic cloves 1 squeeze of lemon 1 small handful of pine nuts Extra virgin olive oil Stuff everything but the olive oil with some salt and pepper into a jar. Slowly add olive oil while zapping it with a hand blender. Keep adding and mixing until it comes together.

So after dinner, I looked it up on the Internet and I read this article out loud about how some chefs call it the evil fish or something like that. Apparently one of the fats that makes escolar flesh so luscious is indigestible by humans which can lead to “intestinal discomfort.” An oceanic Olestra. We all laughed nervously. The article recommended that you grill it so the fat can drip away in portions no larger than three ounces. I baked 14 ounce fillets – extra juicy. Oops. Oh well. How bad could it be? CUT TO: MORNING. I woke up with a rumbling in my stomach. Hm. Gurgle. Uh. Oh no. Then something terrible happened. Something unspeakably horrific. And then I made it to the bathroom. This continued on and off for a couple hours until I gathered the strength to call Ole and John. Ole had no problems. John was fine. So I thought it was me. And then I got calls from both of them not two hours later. I was not alone. For three days, we suffered in ways that – well if you need a description, just read the side of a nonfat Pringles can from the ‘90s.