Our new friends Lee and Mary Ann invited us over for Blue Crabs! It was so much fun! Of course these pictures are backwards but oh well! It seems brutal but we have always dropped the live crabs into boiling water. I have been told they can be toxic if allowed to die and then cooked! So this first picture is of the end result of the meal our hosts provided.
This pot is filled with boiling water with spices and then the live crabs are dropped in.
Tongs are necessary because these blue crabs are very nimble and their pinchers will hurt you bad if you mishandle them! Even though I have eaten crabs many times I had several holes in my fingers and slices in my skin after eating my share. The shell is sharp and the pinchers have little horns on them! These crabs are becoming more plentiful lately here in the Laguna Madre body of water we live close to. If you get the chance, try some blue crabs for dinner. You will need an experienced person to guide you, because there are a lot of parts inside there that you shouldn't eat. They are very delicately flavored and some dip them in melted butter but Marianne made a wonderful sauce for us!
Our Friends Lee and Mary Ann got the wild idea to go get some fresh oysters and we would fix them for supper! They brought home a hundred pounds of live oysters in the shell! Laurence and Lee spent an hour or so shucking oysters. There is a special tool like a letter opener but thicker and stubbier, that you force into one end of the shell that splits the two halves. Then you swipe under the creature to seperate it from its anchor to the shell. We rinsed them and ate them until we were about to pop! Marianne fixed a dozen as Rockefeller style and wow were they good! I should have taken a picture of them! They were pretty to see and scrumptious to eat! 
