Alaskan Crab Legs

I grew up eating lobster. That was the finest of the fine, the most decadent of the decadent, the most hedonistic of the hedonistic. To eat lobster with a big bib around your neck, a nut cracker at your side, and a bowl of melted butter at your elbow was about as close to heaven as you could get in New England.

When I was young my father, who forced me to eat almost everything, would suddenly say when lobster was served: "Oh, children, you wouldn't like these..." Well, we didn't like chicken livers, mushy green beans or tuna casserole and we had to eat those. We knew something was up.

When we finally tasted it (culls only, of curse--the two clawed lobsters were for my parents) we knew why he had hidden it from us. It was too delicious to be believed. It was also once forbidden--which heightens the flavor of anything!

Out in California we don't eat lobster. There is none around. And if there is, you know they flew it in from Maine, and in this world of waste who can justify that? So we eat west coast specialties.

But somehow, we had never eaten alaskan crab leg.

I had seen it at the market--the long spindly legs on ice. I just had never had a hankering to buy it. No one told me what I was missing. Until one New Year's Eve at the home of some friends. Our gourmet friend Monty served Alaska Crab Legs with melted butter, meyer lemon juice and nut crackers. I was ready to judge it as a second-rate lobster knock-off until I tasted it.
My God!!!! All I remember was lots of champagne, endless crab, and rivers of butter and meyer lemon juice running down my arm, into my fancy sleeve, with me chasing down the perfect crabby, buttery, lemony, salty rivulets with my tongue.

How had no one told us????? How had they let us live on in our East Coast ignorance???
Well, now we know. And on special occasions we get the crab legs. And unlike my father, we share them with our children, who love them, too.

Does that make us real West Coasters at last?