I just didn't have time to get this out over the weekend, or didn't feel like it, or for whatever reason it was.

For me, the simplest meals are always the best. For one, they're easy to prepare and that's nice. And if it's something like a great steak off the grill, dry-rubbed ribs like you've never tasted, or some form of seafood I find that overdoing the meal in terms of numbers of dishes, fancy preparations or sauces, etc., can be plain detrimental to enjoyment.

Well, what we have here is the king of crabs: dungeness; not king crab. My opinion, anyway. I like king for the hefty meat quantity (two legs will do for a meal), and snow crab is nice and sweet. But for a combination of delicate meat and good quantity (snow crab is lots of work for little meat), dungeness is the way to go.

I got these live at the wonderful, wonderful 99 Ranch Market. $3.69 per pound, live in tanks (they have about a dozen kinds of fish you can get live…like sea bass and such). $12 for two whole crabs.

Easy to cook. Boiling water, salted as you would for pasta, 20 minutes. Put them in cold water a few minutes, then in the refrigerator for at least two hours, and then until ready to serve. Cleaning is a cinch.

Now, you can reheat to serve. That's an option, and to be perfectly frank, placing them in a zip-lock in the microwave for a couple of minutes is as good as anything for reheating. You can also place them on the grill if you're grilling 'surf,' in addition. We had ours chilled, and here's why: it's just better. For years, I've had dungeness heated, with drawn butter and lemon. It's great. Then, a couple of years ago I was in Chicago in January, and with a foot of snow on the ground, a friend said "c'mon," and we walked behind the hotel that was on Michigan Ave., and just a block over to Shaw's Crab House. No way we were getting into the main dining room without a reservation any time soon, so we took a table in the oyster bar. Then he tells me to have the chilled dungeness with the remoulade. Yep. I was hooked and have prefered it that way since, though there's no such thing as having it in a bad way.

There's all different kinds of ways to make remoulade, from the classic French way — with a bit of Dijon, capers, pickle, and some spices (added to mayonnaise, of course) — to others, including Danish, and so forth. For this application, I use finely chopped green onion, a couple of gloves of fresh, crushed garlic, lemon, and pepper. Simple; play with the proportions, and it goes great with the delicate crab meat. You can put it all in a blender in order to make the sauce creamy. I like the fine chunkiness, myself.

Try it.

Oh, the salad. Well, I hardly touched mine, but it's iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, avocado, and red onion dressed with Bob's Big Boy Thousand Island from the supermarket. Fresh and chilled seafood is the only time I like thousand island, and it's getting to where that's all that will do, though a creamy blue cheese is still workable. Mostly though, it's all about the crab and I'd be fine with having just that alone.

Here's a wider angle of the whole dinner setting up at the cabin and out on the deck.