My Man's Man

Murphy’s Seafood in Boise, Idaho had an entire crab menu today!  I had the crab cakes and they were yummy.

As part of our New Year’s Eve dinner we had crab legs.  This is a recipe even I can’t mess up!  (Luckily I’m not even tested as Frank took care of the whole dinner.)

• Boil some water with salt.
• Put in the crab legs.
• Boil for 10 minutes.

They are ready to eat.

At our traditional New Year’s Eve dinner, the main dish was lobster tails.  Yum!  Frank also says they are easy to make.

• We bought 4 oz lobster tails – two for each person.
• Wash the tails in cold water.
• Take poultry shears, split the shells from the top to the tail.
• Crack open the shells and pull the meat out.  (This is just to make it easier to eat later.)
• Put them in a baking dish.
• Put a clove of crushed garlic on each tail.  (Make sure all your dinner guests eat at least one tail so you all smell like garlic!)
• Slice a stick of butter the long way and put a slice on each tail.  (The slice will just cover the tail.)
• Sprinkle the tails with seasoning salt.
• Put the tails in the oven on broil on the very top shelf.
• Bake for 10-15 minutes.

Yummy and easy!  I saw that we still have some more frozen lobster tails in the freezer so I’ll have to request them for dinner soon!

Usually we have our big seafood dinner on Christmas Eve but this year we had it on New Year’s Eve.  It was scrumptious!  I’ll be posting all the food and recipes but here’s a teaser:

• Lobster tails
• Mussels
• Shrimp ceviche
• Crab legs
• Twice baked potatos
• Asparagus

As usual, everything was awesome.  (I didn’t do anything but taste it!)  Frank even added candle light this year and some really great presentation ideas like putting the ceviche in martini glasses.

Mussels make an easy and delicious appetizer.  What you’ll need for 3-4 people:

• 2 pounds of mussels
• lot of fresh crushed garlic
• enough white wine to cover the bottom of the pan – 1/4 to 1/2 an inch of white wine (we used a huge $5 bottle of chardonnay)
• chopped white onions

Wash and scrub the mussels in the sink and pull off the "beards."  Throw away any that are open and don’t close when you wash them.  Soak in cold fresh water for at least an hour.

Put all of the ingredients in a frying pan, bring to a boil and boil until the shells are all open. 

Serve warm with melted butter on the side.

When we are in San Francisco Frank and I always have one dinner in our hotel room.  We go down to Fisherman’s Wharf, buy a lot of crab, some bread, clam chowder and a bottle of wine.  Then we go back to our hotel room, order some melted butter and wine glasses and have a feast.

A couple of tips:

• If you order the melted butter from room service, check the quantity and the price.  One year we got a pound of melted butter for $17!
• Make sure to order a cork screw when you order the wine glasses!

Enjoy!

Frank and I have a terrific Christmas Eve tradition.  We stay at home and have an awesome seafood dinner.  Planning and cooking it is part of the fun.  Then we sit around and eat for hours and afterwards we open our gifts to each other.  Last year we had mussels, shrimp and lobster tails. 

This year the plan is to have our seafood dinner on New Year’s Eve and Frank has already started planning the menu:

• lobster
• mussels
• shrimp
• asparagus
• crab

He also shops around for the best place to buy it including ordering it live.  (We order live crayfish every year for our big party – last time they got shipped from Minnesota of all places!)