Crab Bisque

Today was another tough day. Give me a dead fish anytime and I’ll turn it into beautiful little fillets, but don’t give me anything’s that’s alive that I have to kill. I don’t want to be the killer, ya know? Once it’s dead then I can rationalize that some one else killed it, so I might as well cook it and not let it go to waste. I know this is hippocritical. And I can feel the burn already from all my vegetarian friends out there. I mean, if an animal is killed quickly and painlessly then it’s better than….

We made crab bisque today. Live crabs. We had to grab them carefully to avoid their pinchers, throw them into a saute pan of hot olive oil and crush them with the end of a rolling pin. Sounds straight up except that they don’t like to be caught. They like to run around on their little claws, clickety-clackety clickety-clackety out of the pot and all over the kitchen.

You’re probably thinking that Le Cordon Bleu is incredibly cruel, but in reality, for most of us carnivores out there, we just don’t like to think about where food comes from and how it is prepared. It’s the ole, “What I don’t know can’t hurt me”. Most of the recipes that we cook at LCB are old and time tested passed down for hundreds of years. The natural order to life (and death) in effect without guilt. However, being Californian I’m used to doing my hunting at Whole Foods Market where everything is organic, colorful, tasty, and dead.

Lately, I’ve been dealing with animal mortality and how I feel about it. How I feel about the fact that I deem some animals as killable and others I don’t. Working with veal and rabbit is very difficult for me, however chickens and fish do nothing to me emotionally. I can rip the tendon out of a chicken leg faster than you can say cock-a-doodle-do. But when I get a piece of veal, it really tugs at my heartstrings. Perpas it’s the nurturer in me that wants everything and everyone to be okay and looked after – or at the very least allowed to live freely up until death…et viola….Crab Bisque!