National Eat Crab Day

It's a thing:  National Eat Crab Day:  March 9th.  We were deciding what theme to use to cook for each other this weekend so I looked it up.  We were going to have a chef off--Judd cooks for me one day and I cook for him another day, but we got sidetracked.  We decided to have a backyard BBQ with a VA friend, but made Dungenuss crab the pre-quel. A local market, Cartwright's, has a massive meat/seafood counter and we asked for the three biggest crabs they had, and two strips of bacon.  After they laugh at us for buying so little bacon, they package our crabs. They are  already cooked, so we only needed to Youtube a tutorial on how to get into them.  And then we shopped for claw crackers, picks and newspaper to use as a table cloth. 

 


Zack was a good sport and got up to his elbows in crab goo. But lots of good hunks of meat, much like a satisfying lobsterfest, followed by Judd's ribs, twice baked potatoes )with bacon garnish), Rebecca's Mexican rainbow slaw and Linda from bookclub's dark tofu chocolate pie. Crab seem harder to dig into and get rewarding hunks of meat, but maybe we just have a lobster bias. We were too sated to imagine popcorn and a movie (rent an Oscar nominee on Netflix.) Zach went back to Medford and Judd and I didn't wait up for daylight saving day to start to set the clocks ahead.



This morning we got up "early" and took our tea and granola bars for a hike up Upper Table Rock.  We had taken Kelcy to Lower Table Rock in the Fall but never done Upper.  We left in thick fog and the mesa was shrouded in a cloud, just barely poking out at the top.  By the time we found the trail head, the cloud was moving off through the valley.  And when we summited, the panoramic views were almost clear:  Mt. McCloughlin to the east, Mt. Ashland to the south and Lower Table Rock to the west and the Rogue River below.  Many spring flowers were just beginning to bloom, many more to getting ready to pop in April.  

 

After the hike and a quick lunch at Mazatlan Grill in Central Point, we went to the Jackson Wellspring for a soak in the natural hot springs again.  This day was warm enough (62degrees) for kids (and Judd) to be back and forth between the 102 degree hot tub and the cold swimming pool, noodles, goggles and all. On our way home, we spontaneously stopped at a new winery:  Paschal, overlooking the hills of Ashland and Phoenix.  A little dog greeted us who had clearly been stomping grapes with his paws.