bueys de mar por Navidad--- crab for Christmas

 December cooking date with Stacey, we missed our November one because we were both busy, but then we realized that we had both cooked quail eggs in November! ha! so that would count as our usual get-to-together.
So we ventured ourselves into the Mercado Barceló in our neighbourhood, mustered all the courage we had, and came home with two of these guys!! 12 euro for the 2 of them.


Oh man....what a mess, how much work and how cruel. It's a good thing I did this yesterday because Im not doing it again. Anyway....

Ingredients:

me with gloves and even then i couldnt even pick it up....i threw
in the water holding it with the paper, qué asco.

• Two bueys de mar, big crabs.
• 3 litres of water and 3 spoonsfuls of salt.
• LOTS OF COURAGE!

Stacey was one thousand times more brave than  I

 1. Ok, basically pick them up and just throw them into the water. If they are alive you need to put them in cold water, like 3 litres, put a lid on, because they'll try to escape and just wait until the water boils. Then cook them for about 15 to 20 min. They say it's 500g for 15 min, 700g for 17 and 1kg for 20 min. So we left ours for 17 min in the water AFTER the water boiled.
2. OK, this is a cruel recipe....I hated seeing those guys die slowly, it was awful...and Im not doing it again.They are ugly, which definitely helps to cook them, but still, they havent done anything to you....
3. Pick them up from the water and put them underneath the tap water for a few seconds, until they cool them down. Then start pulling their legs and place them on a plate. Another thing we did was to smash them a little with a rolling pin to crack the shell so that it wouldn't be so hard to open during dinner.

 4. Voila, dinner done. It tasted really good, that's true, but oh man....this was a lot of work...and sad....as the british says, this is definitely a "one-off" for me, which means: never again. 

our dinner to the very left.... the table  did looked pretty good...