Feeling Crabby

Well, phooey! I'm feeling crabby. We live on the edge of the San Francisco bay and that's usually a bonus - except this summer when the fabled fog has blanketed our town most days from early morning 'til noon and sometimes beyond. And the conditions that make for fog make it windy, too - too windy to even enjoy our sheltered deck on the lee side of the house without taking a blanket along. Makes our daytime temperatures a lot more like a chilly spring than a sunny summer.

Just so you understand, I moved here from Rochester, New York. Now, I liked Rochester - it's a fine place full of hardworking, worthy people - but it's the second cloudiest city in the U.S., second only to Seattle. I got more than my share of cloudy days when I lived there. The first year I lived there, out of 365 possibles, we had 65 sunny days. So, I moved here at least partly for the predictable sunshine. I guess one crummy summer in fifteen shouldn't be a cause for kvetching but, when you come from Rochester, it just is.

Crab salad, however, is ample compensation. When you eat crab salad on a ship of sweet summer melon with ripe strawberries snugged alongside like tugboats hugging the hull of an ocean liner, you can forget that it's chilly outside and just enjoy the summery tastes.

The crab isn't local - it came from Washington state in a little plastic tub - but it is Dungeness and it really was lovely, sweet and briny. I just added some minced celery, sliced green onion, a dab of Dijon, a small spoonful of mayo and the juice of half a lemon, all mixed together. I was tempted to go herbal but then decided that when ingredients are as fresh and perfect as this, they don't need primping.

Who needs drugs when you have mood enhancers like this, a lunch guaranteed to make you feel both more and less crabby.

*Of course, I wrote this a few days ago and today the fog is gone! Go figure.