New Restaurant

I ate a big pile of crab at Red Lobster. I tore those crustaceans up. Gary had to dodge claws. Crab juice was flying. Eventually a pound of crab was in my belly and a pile of shells were on the table.

I asked the waiter, if one day I became unable to crack open the crabs, was there an option on the menu of pre-shelled crab with butter.

"Nope," he said, and then volunteered that he was sure Gary would always be glad to shell my crabs for me. I lied and said, "Of course!" But of course: not.

However, it got me thinking: how about an all-crab restaurant in which bare-chested waiters come by with crab legs? Then as you sit there daintily, the waiter takes the crab in one massive hand and crushes it like a beer can. Then he deftly sorts out the crab meat and arranges it on your plate.

And then he dips it in butter and feeds it to you. No. That's too far. I just need the shell gone.

I also need a name. It's down to: Exoskeleton, Crab Kings, or Mussels.

Comments

[KC]

Expensive, but brilliant, especially for the dexterity-challenged. (one can buy pre-shelled crab meat, but 1. it is pricey and 2 it often has bits of shells in it, which is sort of Exactly Not The Point.)

Crab Kings with Mussels? ;-)

[theQueen]

KC - pre-shelled sounds like something you could get in a grocery. I want the shelling to take place somewhere in the restaurant if not directly under my nose. It seems at the chain places I go they come in two styles: In the shell or minced up.This requires more investagtion.

[KC]

Maybe you could hire someone on TaskRabbit to come to dinner with you and shell your crab? :-)

[theQueen]

KC - Thanks for the reminder about TaskRabbit. I wonder if I could find someone to weed there.

[KC]

I bet you could, although I am not up on which online service is most in use in your community. Craigslist would also have that sort of thing. Or there's the old-school but effective "post a note in the local community center/pool/church/? bulletin board" option.

Whether you can easily find someone to weed the weeds but not the things you *want* in the garden: less certain, unless your desired plants are mostly shrub-sized. (at one of our rented housing locations, the contracted landscaping company once weed-whacked down my not-flowering-at-the-time tulips, believing all not-immediately-flowering greenery below 1.5 ft. tall to be weeds. I was, shall we say, not thrilled.)

[theQueen]

KC- every time I consider having someone else weed I think of my passive-aggressive grandmother who "helpfully" pulled up all my Mom's Ajuga. Granted, technically it's bugleweed, but Mom had cultivated it artfully over some decaying wood and some patio flaws. Go help whoever gets this house with the Creeping Jenny, Bugleweed, and Trumpet vine.

[KC]

Ouch. Ouch ouch ouch. Do you have any idea whether she mostly wanted to get rid of the plant which was Impersonating a Real Plant successfully (can't have people allowing weeds to pass as flowers) or whether she mostly wanted to expose the flaws the vine was disguising, or something else?

(also: I once planted anemone bulbs and then, the next spring, accidentally weeded most of them up because the leaves look a lot like a weed we had and I didn't actually know what anemone leaves looked like, *which* would be the winner in my personal bad-weeding contest *except* that I have also weeded up a *fresh-planted seedling* out of a batch that I had only just installed the day before or so. [only one; it was obvious when I pulled it up that it had been potted, and ooops, but still!])

[TheQueen]

KC - it was a crafty passive-aggressive move, not confusion. Boredom mixed with spite.

[KC]

The passive-aggressive I'm most accustomed to from, uh, elder female relatives (I have *lucked out* with my mother-in-law and step-mother-in-law, just to note, but otherwise...) tends to have some sort of message behind it; commentary on what you're doing or the Correct State of Affairs vs. Your State Of Affairs (like meticulously cleaning three square inches of a bathtub to an absolutely pristine level so that it is Very Clear that the rest of your bathtub is Not Quite Clean Enough, or giving someone a "helpful hint" kind of present); so I was curious what the intention/message/offense was in this case, since different people have different concepts.

But there are, I guess, the passive-aggressive "I hate you and I want to annoy you" actions that require no action-specific message; eating one bite out of each cookie, that sort of thing...

Ah, human beings and the ways in which they suck.

[TheQueen]

KC - I think she was saying “Don’t ask me to baby-sit my rotten step-children, also, I am bored and jealous of your gardening skills.” My mother-in-law is excellent as well.