Dungeness Crab for New Year's

The Dungeness Crab, Cancer magister is named for the town of Dungeness, Washington, because it's the site of the first commercial commercial crabbing venture for the species. Today, Dungeness is the home of a major annual Dungeness Crab Festival. You can usually find fresh local dungeness crab in coastal Oregon and Washington from December to February, and then again, briefly, in June. If you don't want to try catching and cooking your own dungeness crab, you can buy it fresh crab at most local grocery stores, directly from crabbers, or seafood specialty shops like VIS Seafoods or the fish markets at Pike Place Market in Seattle, and settlements around Washington's Hood Canal.

You can buy frozen cooked dungeness crab in the shell; these need to be thawed, and have their shells cracked. You pick out the crab meat, discarding the viscera and gills. You can also buy cooked "cleaned" dungeness crab meat by the pound. I admit that when I can't, for whatever reason, obtain just caught seafood, I prefer the lazy cook's version, cleaned, cooked, and ready for me to use. This is the perfect time of year to enjoy dungeness crab, and New Year's Day is the perfect holiday. You're still over-stuffed from Christmas and Hanukah, the Solstice has come and gone, and you really don't want to have all that New Year's Eve champagne on top of another heavy dinner. You can make wonderful rich hearty crab bisques and stews, but they go so very very well with a small field green salad and a loaf of artisan bread that it doesn't have to be a huge meal to be satisfying, and thoroughly enjoyable.

Dungeness crab is the way to go. The cooking is easy, it's a seasonal Pacific Northwest treat, and it's not outrageously expensive at this time of year. I should confess right up front that I'm a bit of a traditionalist; there are so many crab cake, crab bisque, and crab salad recipes to make with dungeness crab that I could easily just stop right there. But it's a New Year, and there is a simple, and lovely sounding recipe for Dungeness Crab with Cellophane Noodles (sometimes called glass noodles, these delicate noodles are a staple of Asian cuisine and simple to cook).

I'd pair most of these crab dishes with a Northwest sparkling wine, a Sauvignon Blanc, or possibly, for the spicy dishes, a Gewürtztraminer from Washington or Oregon. For a really rich crab bisque, or a tomato based dungeness crab cioppino, I'd think hard about a Cabernet Sauvignon from Washington. For the beer enthusiast, an IPA from Lagunitas, or the Full Sail IPA or Pale Ale.