Blue Crabs

The blue crab is the most common East Coast crab and is usually served simply boiled. Extracting the meat from blue crabs is frustrating for anyone not brought up eating them, so unless you know what you are doing, hesitate to extract your own crabmeat when cooking for a crowd. At certain stages in their life cycles, blue crabs shed their outer hard shell and for a few days are surrounded with a soft shell that gets harder each day. The trick, of course, is to catch the crabs as soon after this shedding as possible.