I got CRABS for my birthday!

I know I'm a bit late on posting this, but this is what we did for John's birthday.  Big deal in DC (Virginia, Maryland) in the summer is blue crab.  So, pretending to be natives, we thought we try it out.

Our good friend from MN, Drew, who is living just outside of Baltimore drove down and joined us.

We went to a place called The Quarterdeck in Arlington.  Basically you sit down, order some beer (see pitcher in upper right hand corner) a few appetizers, and put in your crab order.  The crabs come in small, medium, or large and you can order them by the half-dozen. The crabs take between 30-45 minutes, so you drink beer and eat appetizers while you wait.  Then some guy carries them out on a huge tray, dumps them on your table and walks away.  Which if you are actually a native, is no big deal.  However, if you've never done this before it presents a small problem.  The 3 of started whacking away with our mallets and trying to figure out where exactly the meat was and what was edible.

After we had each completely decimated a crab with little to no success, we were finally able to flag down our waitress and learn the trick to eating crab. Amazingly, they have a pull-tab.  As my co-worker Nate claims, crab was invented by God specifically to be eaten by humans since they are the only food with a pull-tab.  Basically you pull on this thing, and the crab open right up.

After that, mmmmm delicious!