Hot Buttered Crab Claws

I like fried food just as much as the next Southerner, and growing up in Coastal Alabama, we all start liking fried seafood pretty early in life. I can remember my mother cutting up fried shrimp to put on my baby sister’s high chair tray. Fried fish had to be picked through incredibly carefully for any small child at the table for fear of bones, but picked through it was. And it wasn’t just seafood, either. By the time my oldest child was about 2, she would eat fried okra as long as I was willing to stand there and cook it. The amount of fresh okra that constitutes a mess of okra at my house has risen steadily beginning when she was a toddler*. My own trifecta of very favorite childhood foods was fried shrimp, fried okra, and fried chicken with rice and gravy, in that order. (Add to that watermelon, lime sherbet, lady peas, my mother’s lasagna, and sour cream and onion Charles’ Chips, and I would have followed you anywhere. But I digress.)

Back to fried foods: I don’t fry things so much anymore. Now I could stand here and insist that this was a health measure, but let’s get real: I don’t fry things at home because cleaning up afterward is a pain in the butt. And I’m trying to lessen things like that.

A few weeks back I was the happy recipient of some marvelous, fat, local, crab claws. Now we all know and love fried crab claws, but I have very rarely fixed them at home. I certainly didn’t want to break out the fryer. And I really like them floating around in my gumbo, but I wasn’t ready to make gumbo, either. Still, fresh crab claws–especially gifted ones!–are a bona fide treat and I wanted to do right by them. What I wanted was a crab claw recipe that was quick, easy every which way, and made me happy to be alive.

Behold! I have found it: Hot Buttered Crab Claws.

The recipe below is a riff on a recipe I tore out of a magazine and stuffed in my recipe box years ago. I have no idea which magazine–somehow I didn’t tear out any identifying information along with the recipe. Mea culpa. I made these amazing crab claws last week, and we ate them all up before I remembered to get a photo. (I KNOW. I am working on that.) I had two pounds, though, so I made them again today.

*Regarding fried okra: I got proactive the second time around and told my younger daughter that fried okra was horrible, slimy, and kept you awake, and she still won’t touch it, thank god. But, alas, where crab claws are concerned she can and will happily eat anyone under the table.

And cleaning up is a breeze!