Although the Rotary Club’s 12th Annual Crab Fest has had to adjust its format for the Saturday, Feb. 13 event, Rotarian Skip King says it offers a unique opportunity for Valentine’s weekend.
Picture enjoying an eight-ounce serving of lump crab, six prawns, coleslaw, corn on the cob, dinner roll, two sauces and chocolate cake, all ready to pick up curbside and serve at home with a carnation included. Imagine you and your true love in the candlelight……
Tickets for the event are $50 each. Curbside pick-up only will be available from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. at Cottonwood on the Greens Restaurant where owners Pawel and Dorota Listwan and their staff, along with volunteer Rotarians and members of the Los Alamos High School Interact Club will deliver the food items, each packaged separately, to the curb.
King, who has been a Rotarian for just under 30 years, is excited about the Crab Fest although he says he will miss the in-person contact. When King and his wife, Linda, moved to Los Alamos in 2009, the Rotary Club didn’t have an actual annual fundraiser but sold hotdogs at the Gordon’s Concerts at Ashley Pond. The Crab Fest has been a great fundraiser for Rotary, he said, and has allowed the local club to raise some $200,000 to fund projects such as the tree house, picnic tables and fences at PEEC, an assistive hearing audio loop for Smith Auditorium and the LAHS Memorial Garden as well as international projects including a learning center and children’s heart surgeries in Mexico, bridge building in Nicaragua, women’s businesses in Bolivia, the purchase of classroom furniture and school supplies in the Dominican Republic, and earthquake disaster relief in Nepal.
“Los Alamos is a very close-knit community and people here always rally around our service organizations. We are hoping that this year people will continue to step up and support the Crab Fest,” King said.
He noted that most of regular sponsors of the event have made their usual contribution and instead of funding a table for their guests, are donating their meals to local police and firefighters on duty. The meals will be delivered to the first responders by Oliver and Kateri Morris.
King is also excited about an online auction being held in conjunction with the Crab Fest from Feb. 1 through Feb. 14.
“People will have a chance to browse the dozens of items being offered for auction during a two week period instead of having to try and bid on them during the limited time they have to sign up at our prior events,” he said. “There is no cost to participate in the online auction and there is a huge variety of items.”
Items included so far are a Dodge Rampvan, wine, autographed baseballs, golf at Angel Fire, jewelry and accessories.
“You can bid on everything from trips to Las Vegas or Disney World to a hummingbird banding activity with a gourmet lunch,” King said. “So check back often as new items will be added regularly.”
King said one of the projects which will be funded with the proceeds of the event will be a second Meals of Hope food-packing event for food banks throughout Northern New Mexico. Last September, the Rotary Club along with community volunteers packaged some 40,000 servings of rice and beans during that event.
To purchase Crab Fest tickets now and to participate in the online auction starting Monday, go to app.galabid.com/crabfest.
For more information on the event or to learn more about the Rotary Club of Los Alamos and its charitable service, call Laura Gonzales, president, (505) 699-5880, or Skip King, membership chair, (505) 662-8832.
Some of the restaurant world’s greatest food items have come from mistakes, near mistakes, the need to use by-products, and items that were – at one time or another – headed for the trash can.
That chocolate lava cake dessert that was so hot in the late 1990s was actually a mistake made when a chef pulled an individual chocolate cake out of the oven too early and the center was uncooked and oozed out onto the plate once it was cut. As overused and commercial as that dessert has become, I still like it – mainly because I’m the type of guy who would rather lick a spoon from a bowl of brownie batter than eat an actual brownie.
For years seafood suppliers separated crabmeat into three categories: the less expensive and smaller picked-over lobes of crabmeat usually called “special white,” the slightly larger lobes called simply, “lump,” and the king daddy – and most expensive – of all blue crabmeat sold by the pound, “jumbo lump.” Crab claws were usually stripped from the cartilage and sold as “claw meat.” No one wanted claw meat still on the claw.
Fried crab claws were invented by Bill Bayley, a former Merchant Marine seaman, who owned a restaurant on the Dauphin Island Parkway in the heart of blue crab country and not too far from the epicenter for great crabmeat, Bayou La Batre, Alabama. Sometime after Bayley opened the restaurant in 1947, he got tired of throwing away crab claws and decided to bread them, deep fry them, and serve them with tartar sauce. A menu craze was born, though it took years for fried crab claws to become the hot menu item they are today.
Thirty years ago, when I was doing all of the purchasing in the kitchens of our restaurants, I paid $4.95 for a pound of crab claws. I just checked my price on today’s seafood purchasing sheet and we are purchasing domestic crab claws for $21.99 per pound. Just to give you a relational comparison, my price for filet mignon today is $11.76 per pound. A former throwaway byproduct of the seafood industry is now almost twice as expensive as what many consider the finest cut of steak.
We were one of the first restaurants in town to serve fried crab claws. In the early 2000s, they got so expensive, I didn’t feel right about having them on the menu because of what we would need to charge for them, so I took them off. People were mad. I stood my ground for almost a decade. Then, one day in late summer when the price was down, I added them back as a feature item. They were still a costly item, but people wanted them and didn’t mind paying. I learned a valuable lesson then – give the people what they want, if they want it bad enough, they are happy to pay the cost.
In the 1980s, we were the very first restaurant in town to serve Buffalo wings. I have a friend who spent a career in the chicken business. He started in the early 1960s when wings were the least desirable part of the chicken and ranked just above the beaks and feet. “We couldn’t give them away in the 1970s,” he once told me. “Now people are raising chickens for the wings and breasts, alone.”
Hot wings might be the most popular of all of the by-product dishes. There are national chains all across the country – some with hundreds of units – that specialize in deep frying chicken wings and tossing them in a mixture of margarine and hot sauce.
There are several active arguments over who served the first hot wings, and I won’t get into that squabble here. It doesn’t really matter, though it appears that sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s they started making an appearance on menus. Like the Cobb Salad, I imagine someone was just throwing together a quick dish in the kitchen and tossed some leftover fried chicken wings in a simple hot sauce dilution, and then threw in a side of blue cheese dressing as a foil and added a few celery sticks because they were cheap and helped to lessen the heat.
Today there are hundreds of bastardized wings being sold, using hundreds of sauce combinations, with many varying degrees of heat. My son used to like boneless wings which are not wings at all, but another by-product of a breast cut. Today he agrees with the old 14th-century adage, “The nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat.”
A lot of corporate-themed restaurant companies have hopped onto the hot wing bandwagon over the past decade, but my son (who is truly a devout hot wing aficionado, as are most in his generation) and I have found that – like barbecue joints – the best wings are served in some of the roughest-looking places.
Bayley’s Seafood Restaurant is still operating in the same building in Lower Alabama. Chain restaurants and fast-food joints have whittled into Bayley’s volume, but ground zero for fried crab claws is still Bayley’s Corner on the Dauphin Island Parkway. They fry them right and pile them high. The next time you’re in the area, stop in to one of the South’s old-line seafood establishments. It’s not every day one gets to visit the birthplace of a world-renowned dish.
They’re prehistoric, alien-looking creatures that capture children’s attention at aquarium touch tanks and swarm the Garden State bays at each summer’s outset.
They’re horseshoe crabs — and now they’re more important than ever.
The animals are critical to the work of pharmaceutical companies, especially during this pivotal mass distribution of the coronavirus vaccine. The crabs’ milky blue blood has been used for decades to detect harmful pathogens in medicines, allowing drugmakers to ensure their products are pure before being shipped out and injected into human arms.
But harvesting the skeletal sea-dwellers isn’t without consequences, especially along the Delaware Bayshore in South Jersey where a long-fought battle between industry and conservation groups rages on.
Few earthly creatures predate the horseshoe crab. The animals, which are not true crabs but more closely related to spiders and scorpions, have remained largely unchanged for 350 million years. Their appearance, an exoskeleton defined by a massive domed head and long pointed tail, is unmistakable.
The world’s largest population of horseshoe crabs uses the Delaware Bay as a spawning ground, according to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission. Every year in May and June, thousands of the crabs come ashore along the bay to mate. Each female crab can lay up to 90,000 eggs on the beach.
Those eggs make the crabs a keystone species for the bay’s ecosystem, serving as a smorgasbord for hungry fish and shorebirds.
Favorite feeders include a threatened species of shorebird call red knots, which use Delaware Bay as a critical rest stop on their annual migration from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego on the southern tip of Argentina. The eggs, full of fats and proteins, are a critical food source for the birds.
Larry Niles, a biologist who has studied the Delaware Bay ecosystem since the 1980s, said his research indicates the number of horseshoe crabs in bay essentially determines the populations of red knots.
“Without that fat, they’ll either die on the way, they’ll die when they get there, or they won’t reproduce,” said Niles, who first worked with New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and now helps conservations groups.
The importance of a healthy horseshoe crab population goes beyond red knots, according to Niles. He stresses the crabs, and their eggs, support the bay’s fish populations as well. It’s an ecosystem that he argues has been long undervalued by state and federal regulators.
“This isn’t just about the birds,” Niles said. “This is about the productivity of the Delaware Bay system.”
Horseshoe crabs have long been harvested for human use. In the 1800s and early 1900s, the crabs were turned into fertilizer and livestock feed used by farms, according to the ASMFC. Horseshoe crab harvests in the Atlantic largely vanished in the mid-1900s after the sea creatures fell out of demand for fertilizer, but returned in the ’90s when they became prized bait for eel and whelk fisheries.
But for most people, horseshoe crabs serve a more practical purpose: Their blood is used to ensure our medicine is safe.
Horseshoe crab blood is the main ingredient in limulus amebocyte lysate (LAL), a compound used by pharmaceutical companies to test drugs for purity, ensuring that bacteria and other pathogens are not tainting the medicine. The crabs’ blood reacts and clots when it encounters harmful endotoxins found in some bacteria, like E. Coli.
“It works really well, it’s extremely accurate and it’s fairly inexpensive.” said Brett Hoffmeister, who heads the horseshoe crab program for the Massachusetts company Associates of Cape Cod, Inc. “This has been the gold standard since the 70s.”
To get that blood, LAL manufacturers like ACCI catch and bleed the crabs, then return the animals to the wild. Hoffmeister said each company operates a little differently, but generally the crabs spend about 24 hours out of their natural habitat for the process.
The ASMFC estimates about 15% of horseshoe crabs that are bled die after the process, though some research has found mortality rates upward of 30%.
Today, the DEP permits just one company — Limuli Labs in Cape May — to take horseshoe crabs from state waters. The business is required to report how many crabs it harvests annually to the state but that information is protected as confidential, according to DEP spokeswoman Caryn Shinske.
Limuli Labs did not respond to requests for comment from NJ Advance Media. Limuli and ACCI are two of just five companies that harvest and bleed crabs along the Atlantic Coast.
Hoffmeister said the biomedical industry has not seen increased demand during the pandemic, though overall demand for LAL testing has steadily increased over the past two decades as the biomedical industry has grown.
“Before COVID even showed its face, we were manufacturing product that is now being used to test these vaccines,” Hoffmeister said.
Caitlin Starks, the ASMFC’s fishery management plan coordinator for horseshoe crabs, said the commission won’t have data for the 2020 crab harvest until July, so it’s too early for regulators to say if the pandemic has driven demand higher.
Intense, unregulated fishing for horseshoe crabs shocked the Delaware Bay ecosystem in the 1990s, as the crabs became highly sought after as bait.
“That stress was so large in the ’90s that it just crashed the populations of horseshoe crabs,” said Tim Dillingham, the executive director of the Highlands-based American Littoral Society.
As the crabs’ population declined in the ’90s, so did the numbers of red knots. Weakfish numbers plummeted in the early 2000s as well, according to the ASMFC, something Niles argues is an effect of the crabs’s woes.
The ASMFC began regulating horseshoe crabs in 1998, in response to the fishing surge, and created limits on how many crabs can be taken from the Atlantic along the entire East Coast. Since 2013, the commission has set an annual limit of 500,000 male horseshoe crabs and zero female crabs for the Delaware Bay population.
The regulations include a mortality threshold of 57,000 horseshoe crabs for the biomedical industry, meaning if more than that sum of crabs die in a given year due to the bleeding operations, regulators are required to consider if stricter rules are needed.
That threshold has been surpassed in 12 of the past 13 years. But each time, the ASMFC has declined to put tighter rules on the biomedical harvesters.
“The thinking is that that level of biomedical mortality is so small that it’s not likely to have any negative impact,” Starks said.
New Jersey went a step further in 2008, enacting a moratorium on harvesting horseshoe crabs from Garden State waters. That measure shut down operations that collected the crabs for bait, but it included a loophole that allows crabs to be collected and bled for biomedical purposes, in turn allowing Limuli Labs to operate in Cape May.
Hoffmeister said he feels LAL manufacturers like his company have been unfairly blamed as a threat to the horseshoe crab stock and red knot numbers. Hoffmeister points to the fact that far more crabs are harvested for bait rather than bleeding, and that most bled crabs are returned to the ocean alive.
“The crabs are not going to go extinct because of it. The birds aren’t going to go extinct because of it,” Hoffmeister said of LAL testing. “This is something that we should be celebrating.”
The bait harvest restrictions have been effective in stabilizing the crab population, but the numbers in Delaware Bay have not been growing. In 2019, the ASMFC determined the bay’s horseshoe crab stock to be “neutral” compared to 1998 numbers, rather than “good” or “poor.”
Given the current state of the stock, conservation groups argue the biomedical operations deserve more scrutiny.
“The bait harvest is absolutely the largest stressor on the populations, but the biomedical industry contributes to it,” Dillingham said. “When you’re in a crisis situation, and you’re facing the extinction of birds, no one gets a pass.”
Conservationists like Dillingham and Niles urged a holistic approach to protecting the crabs.
“If we want to save the red knots, we probably need to remove all these stresses on the horseshoe crab population and aid them in boosting the populations back up,” Dillingham said.
That means stricter rules for bait harvests and crab bleeding, as well as investments to protect crab spawning beaches from damage done by climate change through rising sea levels and more intense storms.
Science may have already found the key to wean the pharmaceutical industry off crab blood.
A synthetic replacement for horseshoe crab blood, a new test called recombinant Factor C (rFC), is taking hold in Europe. The U.S. has not yet matched Europe’s embrace of rFC, but that could be coming soon as federal regulators seek to harmonize the nation’s rules with Europe and Japan.
One U.S. drugmaker, Indiana-based Eli Lilly, has already committed to using rFC for any new products it develops in-house. That includes an antibody cocktail treatment for COVID-19, according to Jay Bolden, a biologist who studies rFC for the company.
Bolden said his research and work done by others has found rFC to be just as good, if not arguably better, than LAL at detecting endotoxins.
Bolden said the plight of the red knots was the main factor in Eli Lilly’s push towards rFC. Instead, the company is making the move for performance, ethics and cost considerations.
Helping the birds would be a bonus, one that Bolden — a birder himself — understands well.
“We’re moving to rFC as a company for a lot of good reasons, but certainly we can appreciate the impact,” Bolden said.
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This week we're looking at California's recycling deposit system and how it became broken to the point local residents have to drive to Crescent City to redeem their deposits or just accept the deposits as a kind of tax, while local grocers face new fees. It's a mess. Speaking of which, get out your bibs because it's time for crab cioppino! NCJ Freelancer Rod Kausen shares his mother's recipe, which was a mainstay at Ferndale's Ivanhoe for years.
BRUNSWICK, Ga. – Georgia’s commercial and recreational food shrimp harvest season will close at 6:31 p.m. Sunday.
The administrative order for the closure affects Georgia’s territorial waters from shorelines 3 miles out to sea and was signed by Mark Williams, commissioner of the state Department of Natural Resource, on Jan. 22.
Williams made the closure at the recommendation of marine biologists with DNR’s Coastal Resources Division and Shrimp Advisory Panel, comprised of commercial and recreational shrimpers, scientists, Georgia residents and nongovernmental organization representatives.
The recommendation was made based on data collected from CRD’s Ecological Monitoring Trawl Survey conducted aboard the Research Vessel Reid W. Harris, which samples shrimp and finfish at 36 sites along the Georgia coast each month.
“Shrimp size relative to estuary location remains as expected with smaller individuals farther inland, but higher count per pound indicates that shrimp in all sectors are small,” said Eddie Leonard, a CRD marine biologist who conducts the trawl survey. “If the movement of smaller shrimp continues as expected, we could pass the ideal size distribution before we resample in February. Smaller shrimp are moving toward the beaches elsewhere and any strong weather event, such as heavy rains or cold temperatures, could accelerate movements offshore and potentially lower abundance.”
By law, shrimp season may open again as early as May 15, 2021, if the Commissioner of Natural Resources—after reviewing recommendations from CRD marine biologists and the Shrimp Advisory Panel—determines the fishery has sufficiently rebounded. Although the law allows for shrimp season to open mid-May, the season has opened in June in all but one of the past five years due to environmental conditions.
The 213 licensed commercial shrimpers in Georgia landed 2.31 million pounds of tails in 2020, valued at $11.4 million, according to landings data gathered January through November 2020. These figures represent a 23-percent increase in landings (pounds of shrimp) over the five-year average, and a monetary value increase of 15 percent over the same time period. These numbers will increase as landing reports from December are processed in the coming weeks.
Time for the kids to put down the mobile devices and tablets for a break. Click for more.
Prepare a small pot of salted water and a separate bowl for an ice bath.
Place the halved shrimp in the boiling water and cook until the shrimp have turned from translucent to opaque, about 2 minutes. Transfer the shrimp to the ice bath to stop the cooking process.
In a large mixing bowl, combine the shrimp with the orzo, tomatoes, olive oil, cucumber, chile, basil, parsley, capers and lemon juice and toss until the ingredients are well-coated with the oil and lemon juice. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Refrigerate until ready to serve.
Add all the coulis ingredients to a small sauce pan and simmer over medium heat for 2 minutes, stirring well. Remove from heat and let cool completely; refrigerate until chilled.
In a large bowl, place all the ingredients for the crab salad; mix well.
Drizzle avocado with lime juice, olive oil, and salt. Gently mash just enough to help hold the cubes together.
Place a lightly greased round mold on the center of the plate. Add the avocado layer first; gently press down (with a spoon) to make it as compact as possible.
Next, add a generous layer of the crab salad. Press down, and then gently remove the mold.
Spoon the tomato coulis around the stack. (You can also use a squeeze bottle)
If you saved some of the lump pieces of crab, add these on top.
You can also garnish the stacks with some additional parsley.
Heat a skillet over medium-high heat. Pour marinade into the skillet and allow it to bubble for about 2-3 minutes. Keep a close eye so it doesn't burn.
Add shrimp and cook for an additional 4-5 minutes, turning often.
Once shrimp are pink and cooked through, remove from heat, pour into large serving dish, top with parsley and serve with rice or a nice crusty bread.
Serves 4-6.
Notes
Typically, the shells are left on, but if you'd prefer, you may remove them.
To devein, take a pair of kitchen scissors, snip the shell down the back and remove the vein.
If you go back far enough in time our common ancestor might be a cuddle fish or an octopus. Though evolution has taken us on different paths, there is still much that connects us to the animal world and to the thoughts and experiences that give it shape. Philosopher and scientist Peter Godfrey-Smith explores the oceans and provides some illuminating insight on the origins of the mind and the nature of consciousness. Also poet and author Aimee Nezhukumatathil on how observing the natural world may mean more than we realize for our physical and mental health.
Every year for Christmas Eve, I make my mom’s Rhode Island clam chowder and a big crab Louie with fresh, sweet Dungeness crab. This year, however, I served the chowder alongside a Caesar salad, because crab season was delayed. Even now that crab is here it can be hard to find. At one store I visited there was a hand-drawn sign on the seafood case reading, “It’s out of our claws! No Dungeness crab!”
Without a doubt, the best place to get Dungeness crab is Alioto-Lazio Fish Company (440 Jefferson Street at Hyde, 888-673-5868, crabonline.com), one of the last family-operated fishing companies in San Francisco. You simply can’t beat crab fresh off the boats. Sisters Annette Traverso and Angela Cincotta are the third generation operating the Alioto-Lazio Fish Company, a woman-owned business that has been located on Fisherman’s Wharf for more than 70 years.
The fishing fleet travels 25 miles or more past the Golden Gate Bridge. Only male crabs measuring 6¼ inches from point to point can legally be harvested, with average weights between 1½ and 2 pounds. The fishermen travel back and forth into the harbor — it takes hours to reach the right spot, hours of work stringing the pots, and hours to return. Alioto-Lazio sells their crabs live, whole cooked, or cleaned and cracked. They also ship their crustaceans overnight. If you haven’t had crab from the first ladies of the wharf, you’re missing one of San Francisco’s greatest gastronomic gifts, as well as part of its rich fishing history (that is sadly disappearing).
With the pandemic, traditional crab feeds are off the table, but Alioto-Lazio is offering a virtual crab feed package this year — they cook, clean and crack the crabs then add sourdough bread, cocktail sauce, and crab cookies. You can pick it up at your school, church, or event site, then get on Zoom with everyone and chow down.
While straight out of the shell is my favorite way to eat Dungeness crab, it’s also wonderful in everything from salads to pastas. One of my all-time favorite Dungeness dishes was the crab angel hair lasagna at the Crab House on Pier 39 (temporarily closed). When it disappeared from the menu, I created my own version to satisfy my craving, which I’ve shared below. The second recipe is a classic crab Louie based on my favorite one at the Wharf’s oldest sit-down restaurant, Fishermen’s Grotto No. 9 (Pier 45 at Taylor, 415-673-7025, thegrottosf.com). The origin of the Louie is one of great debate, but Helen Brown said in her West Coast Cookbook, “it was served at Solari’s in San Francisco in 1914.”
Crab Angel Hair Lasagna
Serves 8
1 cooked Dungeness crab, cracked and cleaned (about 2 cups of crab) with
reserved “crab butter” from top shell
(optional)*
Béchamel Sauce
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
4 tablespoons flour
2 cups whole milk
¼ teaspoon Kosher sea salt
¼ teaspoon or so white pepper (use black if you don’t have it)
Lasagna
1 pound angel hair pasta, cooked very al
dente
¼ cup fresh Italian parsley, stems
removed and leaves roughly chopped
1 cup freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggia-
no cheese
1 tablespoon cold butter cut in chunks
*Crab butter is the fatty mustard-yellow tomalley, or roe, in the top shell. It’s the foie gras of the crab with sweet, briny and mineral overtones.
Crack and clean crab and remove meat from shells (it’s not hard to do, but if you’re squeamish most markets will crack and clean for you). Set aside two cups of meat and reserve the crab butter in a separate small prep bowl for the sauce.
Preheat oven to 400 degrees and set a large pot with 4-6 quarts water over medium-high heat.
Make the béchamel sauce: In a medium saucepan, melt 4 tablespoons unsalted butter. Whisk in 4 tablespoons all-purpose flour until well combined and the “floury” taste is cooked out, about 7–8 minutes. Increase heat to medium-high and slowly whisk in milk. Bring to a gentle simmer, then reduce heat to medium-low, stirring constantly until sauce is thickened and smooth, about 15 minutes. Mix in the crab butter (if using) and salt, turn off heat, and set aside.
Add 1 tablespoon salt to boiling water and once it returns to a full rolling boil, add angel hair and cook for half the time recommended on the package so it remains very al dente. Drain and rinse with cold water to stop the cooking.
Butter a 9×13 baking dish on bottom and sides. Rub a little olive oil on the bottom, then add a layer of pasta. Spread a thin layer of sauce and add some crab. Sprinkle with parsley and grated cheese. Repeat layers, ending with a layer of angel hair. Dot the top with pieces of butter, sprinkle on a little coarse sea salt, and more cheese.
Bake in the middle of the oven about 20–30 minutes, or until top is brown and bubbly. Allow to set about 10 minutes before cutting into individual squares for serving. Serve with extra cheese for passing at the table.
Classic Crab Louie
Serves 4
Louie Dressing
2 cups Best Foods mayonnaise
¼ cup heavy cream
2 tablespoons sweet pickle relish
Dash of hot sauce
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
2 tablespoons lemon juice, freshly squeezed
Salad
One head iceberg lettuce
Fresh meat of two Dungeness crabs
Ripe tomatoes (if in season), cut into wedges
1 small can whole black olives
Canned beets, shredded or sliced
2 pastured eggs, hard-cooked and cut
into wedges
Pepperoncini (optional)
Avocado slices (optional)
Lemon wedges
Whisk dressing ingredients in a bowl and refrigerate until ready to serve.
Tear apart the head of lettuce, wash and thoroughly dry the leaves. Refrigerate until lettuce is crisp cold. Make a bed of lettuce on a large serving platter. Top with a mound of crab. Place tomato wedges, olives, beets, hard-cooked eggs, and, if using, pepperoncini and avocado slices, around the platter. Serve with dressing and lemon wedges on the side.
E-mail: susan@marinatimes.com. Follow the Marina Times on Twitter @TheMarinaTimes and like us on Facebook @MarinaTimes.
The residents who live near the docks on a canal off of Old Fort Bayou said they have complained about the shrimp boats in the past to no avail. They say the boats, owned by Captain Ben’s Boat Dock, are blocking their access to the canal. They also complain of noise, odors, and small spills from bilge pumps.
Law360 (January 29, 2021, 6:12 PM EST) -- A dozen Indian frozen shrimp companies filed suit in the U.S. Court of International Trade, alleging that the U.S. unreasonably disregarded certain sales information in favor of its own data while calculating an anti-dumping tariff.
The companies argued in their Thursday suit that the U.S. Department of Commerce was required to use Z.A. Sea Foods Private Limited's Vietnamese sales activities to assess duties against over 180 frozen warm-water shrimp companies. Instead, the department "deviated" from internal regulation, ignored the data and relied on a constructed value to arrive at 3.06% duties.
"Given that adequate information regarding ZA Sea Foods' Vietnam export...
No need to hit the North Shore to get your Giovanni shrimp truck fix anymore. It’s one of many popular dining destinations located at Keawe Retail at Our Kakaako, our stop for Living808’s latest Hawaii’s Kitchen On the Road.
Giovanni’s Shrimp Truck at Keawe Retail at Our Kaka‘ako located at H Mart Market brings the flavorful shrimp to town. “This was a great opportunity to be in the heart of Our Kaka’ako and it’s great vibe. We’re upstairs at the Market Eatery Food Hall and offer up our favorites, like shrimp scampi, lemon butter and hot and spicy shrimp,” says General Manager Conroy Low.
In 1993, Giovanni’s started operating out of a converted 1953 bread truck with a few recipes for great shrimp and grew to become a must visit on the North Shore, and now town.
“You can still find us on the North Shore and we’re very happy to be here in the heart of Kaka’ako, to serve our fans around Honolulu,” adds Low.
Giovanni’s Shrimp Truck is open Sunday to Thursday 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., and on Friday and Saturday it closes at 9 p.m.
jumi.indah.link Dungeness crab (Photo by Angela Denning/KFSK)
The harvest for Dungeness crab in Southeast Alaska’s commercial fishing season is the second largest on record. The catch from the fall fishery added to one of the few bright spots from last year.
A few areas of Southeast’s commercial Dungeness crab season are still open through February but most areas closed at the end of November. The estimate for the fall harvest is 813,000 pounds. That’s down slightly from recent years. But the 2020 summer harvest was so large–at 5.87 million pounds–that it still makes the total season harvest the second largest ever.
“What we saw last year was a big harvest, it was a big season poundage wise,” said Joe Stratman, Southeast’s lead crab manager for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
The total season harvest for the summer and fall fisheries is 6.68 million pounds. That’s far above the ten-year average, which is 3.28 million pounds but just under the record breaking year of 2002-03.
The total season was worth $11.49 million. That’s mainly because a lot of crab were caught. The price paid to fishermen was below recent years. The fall averaged $1.88/pound and the summer $1.70. That’s about a dollar less per pound than 2019, which averaged $2.79/pound and less than other recent years.
“Even though the price was slightly better in the fall; what we saw in summer and fall prices was down quite a bit from, the recent three seasons, anyway,” Stratman said.
Most of the Dungeness crab were caught in the summer fishery June 15–August 15, which is normal, because conditions are safer and more fishermen are participating. In the fall fishery, the main areas were open for all of October and November. There are still some fishermen crabbing in a few of areas still open but Stratman says it’s not likely that the harvests will change enough to compete with the 2002-03 record year.
Managers rely on Dungeness harvest data because they don’t do separate surveys on the species in Southeast. Harvests have been good in recent years compared to other species of crab. Commercial red king crab fishing has been closed in recent years and commercial Tanner fishing is limited to about a week a year.
But commercial fishing for Dungeness is open for four months a year in many areas and the population seems to be holding.
“I think it’s safe to say we have steady and reliable, annual recruitment into the fishery,” said Stratman. “We’ve got a steady amount of crab that are entering the fishery every year, recruit crab that are legal for the first time and we don’t have any large gaps in our recruitment.”
The Southeast area with the highest harvest in this fall’s fishery was District 12 in northern Chatham Straight [123,000 pounds]. The highest participation in the fishery was District 8 near Petersburg and Wrangell.
The next crab fisheres in Southeast are Tanner and golden king crab in mid-February.
The restaurant was joined by the Greater Binghamton Chamber of Commerce today for a ribbon cutting to celebrate the re-opening. Storming Crab offers a wide variety of seafood such as crab legs, clams, and lobster with Cajun flavor. They also feature some southern favorites like catfish, crawfish and gator.
Ferguson and Harris pulled in local protester Braylin Hardin, who is known for his cheesecakes. Ferguson, a Food Network staple, said they are the best in the country. Hardin’s cheesecakes will be served at Tha Drippin Crab, and Ferguson said he hopes it leads to Hardin opening his own restaurant, continuing the chain of providing more opportunities for people of color to expand their brands.
Katie Schaeffer, RD from Hy-Vee, comes back for a second segment to show off how to use a wok or a really large kitchen skillet in the preparation of a delicious stir fry starring asparagus and shrimp. Protein and veggie substitutes are certainly an option. That’s just one reason stir fry is such a great meal option---use whatever you have in the fridge or pantry! RECIPE IS BELOW
1 lb. Hy-Vee large shrimp, peeled, deveined and tails removed
5 tsp Hy-Vee canola oil, divided
12 oz. Hy-Vee Short Cuts oven-and-grill-ready lemon and garlic asparagus
3 tbsp ponzu sauce
1 tsp refrigerated lemongrass paste
1 (8-oz) container cherry tomatoes
2 cups quinoa, cooked (optional, as base for serving)
1 tbsp chopped cilantro (optional, for topping)
¼ cup roasted cashews (optional, for topping)
Prep steps:
1. Gather ingredients and cut vegetables into bite-size pieces.
2. Pat dry shrimp with paper towel.
3. Heat 3 teaspoon of oil over medium-high in a large wok. (Increase oil as needed when adding foods.)
4. Stir-fry shrimp for 1 to 3 minutes; slide to the outside of the wok to slow cooking but keep it warm.
5. Add the Short Cuts lemon and garlic asparagus to wok and stir-fry 2 to 3 minutes. Then add cherry tomatoes.
6. Push vegetables to the edge of wok and add ponzu sauce and lemongrass paste to the center. Toss with the shrimp and vegetables, and cook about 1 minute or until heated through.
7. Serve by itself or over a bed of quinoa (or preferred grain/cauliflower rice)
In a way, The Feel Good Lab’s November filing summed up 2020 for many businesses.
The company reported to regulators zero dollars against a $200,000 target — not a lot of feel-good vibes to go around during the pandemic, after all.
But the New Haven pain relief developer is now in the process of raising nearly $1 million, one of many Connecticut businesses raising money after a year in which venture capitalists poured more money into the startup sector than in any other during the most recent economic expansion.
Growth-stage companies in Connecticut reported nearly $500 million in funds raised to the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission last year, a 7 percent lift from 2019 despite the economic uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic. Startups socked away more than half that amount in the second quarter alone after New Haven biopharmaceutical company Rallybio’s mammoth funding round, according to SEC filings reported by privately held operating companies tracked by Hearst Connecticut Media.
Aiming for the long-shot payday of an Alexion Pharmaceuticals — a developer of treatments for rare diseases acquired last year for $40 billion by AstraZeneca — venture funds help fuel product development and hiring across industries. That includes consumer product companies like Athletic Brewing in Stratford, whose non-alcoholic beer was named best in the world last year — just three years after its formation.
Last October, Point Pickup Technologies booked one of the largest deals of the year in reporting $31.5 million in fresh funding to the SEC. The company’s platform helps companies secure delivery drivers for e-commerce fulfillment. CEO Tom Fiorita said Point Pickup has upped hiring to a rate of 20 jobs a week of late, mostly at its new Stamford headquarters as it pushes its workforce to nearly 200 people as of mid-January.
It did not hurt that several “gig economy” companies laid plans for initial public offerings of stock during the pandemic — the other major “exit” sought by investors in addition to acquisitions — notably DoorDash and Airbnb.
“The benefit we had, to be quite frank, was being in an industry [at] the top of the newspaper every day — the delivery business,” Fiorita said. “We certainly had attention from quite a few investors. ... To this day, there’s a lot of inbound, unsolicited requests to meet.”
Launched originally in Farmington and now based in New Haven, Rallybio accounted for nearly 30 percent of the Connecticut totals last year, reporting a $145 million package in May. Like Alexion, where Rallybio CEO Martin Mackay worked previously, the company is developing treatments for rare ailments starting with a condition that can cause hemorrhages in newborn infants and fetuses.
Between early January (when Athletic Brewing beat all startups off the mark with a $6.6 million tranche) and the end of December (when New Haven-based Cybrexa Therapeutics registered nearly $15 million from investors in support of a cancer therapy it is developing) about 80 other Connecticut startups reported funding to the SEC, in line with the 2019 total.
Stamford had the biggest concentration of startups in that cohort with 15. That includes New Wave Foods, which pulled in more than $18 million as it develops a plant-based substitute for shrimp amid a continuing boom for culinary protein alternatives.
New Haven was next with a dozen more besides Rallybio and Cybrexa registering funding. But deals spanned the state, from Greenwich-based Woolloomooloo Shoe selling footwear designed with merino wool to Groton’s Atrocyte Pharmaceuticals developing a pill to treat concussions.
Still, experts said during an economic summit hosted last week by the Connecticut Business & Industry Association that state can do far more to nurture startups, including those that promise big-bang growth like Stamford-based biotech firm Springworks Therapeutics or Norwalk-based data backup and security company Datto. Springworks raised nearly $290 million through an October sale of stock on the heels of a 2019 IPO, while Datto landed $594 million the same week in its own IPO.
“After [General Electric] left a few years ago, we all recognized that we need to create our next GE here at home,” said Wes Bemus, executive director of the StamfordNext startup accelerator, one of four to receive state backing under CTNext’s fledgling Innovation Places program alongside programs in New Haven, Hartford and New London. “I’ve been working with entrepreneurs in the community all the way through the pandemic, and really what they’ve seen it as is an opportunity to come up with new ideas and pivot their businesses for the new reality we are living in. ... They’ve reacted to the times.”
Includes prior reporting by Leeanne Griffin, Paul Schott and Luther Turmelle.
The Fresh Market is offering Whole Atlantic Salmon Fillets and Wild American Shrimp for only $5.99/lb on Friday, Jan. 29!
The salmon fillets average 3.5 lbs and are farm raised. The shrimp is raw, peeled and deveined and each bag includes 31-40/lb.
You'll also find a deal for a 12" Cheese or Pepperoni Pizza and 1 lb of chicken wings for $10.99 on Jan. 29, 2021.
The offer details were sent in an e-mail on Jan. 28, 2021 to those signed up to receive their Fresh News and Offers communications. Sign up on their website.
If you download their app, you'll save $10 off a $60 purchase when you use the coupon code: 10OFF60 at checkout online. Exp. January 31, 2021.
SAN RAMON, CA — The San Ramon Historic Foundation will still host its annual crab feed this year. But it's going curbside.
"COVID can't stop our crab feed to support Forest Home Farms," the organization wrote on its website.
Proceeds will benefit programs and facilities at Forest Home Farms.
For $60 per person, diners can pick up a crab meal with about two pounds of cleaned and cracked crab, pasta, salad and French bread. Pickup will be at the Dougherty Station Community Center parking lot (17011 Bollinger Canyon Road) from 2 to 5 p.m. Feb. 27. Sign up here.
The foundation serves to protect and preserve San Ramon's historical buildings and landscapes.
Bryan Poynter, Timothy’s Seafood Shack manager, said, “It sort of kicks off the summertime, you know? It’s your pre-Memorial Day kickoff, so by not having it, you don’t have that big sales spike that weekend, and you lose that momentum. It’s just different.”
Salads are boring, unless you kick them up a notch! (Thanks Emeril)
For mine, I use different lettuces and then top it with some delicious Buffalo shrimp and I make the sauce from scratch. Add some fresh veggies and some homemade avocado ranch dressing to cool things off from the buffalo heat, and you're good to go!
Glenn's Buffalo Shrimp Salad
Chopped romaine and spring mix
Diced English cucumbers
Halved cherry tomatoes
Raw shrimp (16-20 count)
For the buffalo sauce:
2/3 cup Franks red hot sauce
1/4 cup unsalted butter
1/2 tsp Worcestershire sauce
garlic powder to taste
cayenne pepper to taste
Warm everything up in a saucepan
For the avocado-ranch dressing
1/2 cup Bolthouse Farms yogurt Ranch (low in calories)
3 tbs pre-made guacamole from Aldi (or make your own)
Chop your veggies and arrange your salad on plates. Warm a frypan up with a little olive oil, and make sure it's hot. Add your shrimp and saute' until almost cooked (about 90 sec per side). Drain any excess juice and add your buffalo sauce, stirring to coat. Add the shrimp to the top of the salad and drizzle with avocado-ranch dressing. Feel free to add chopped celery and blue cheese or mozzarella if calories don't matter!
Oregon shrimpers put in another great year for 2020, and indicators portend a decent season in store for 2021. Although the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife hadn’t tallied final numbers for the season in December, data with PacFIN reported a harvest of 43.14 million pounds for Oregon with an average ex-vessel price of 52 cents per pounds for fleet revenues of $22.59 million.
“We’re still counting our chips from this year,” says Scott Groth, the pink shrimp/south coast shellfish project leader with Fish and Wildlife, in Charleston. “But it looks pretty good overall.”
The Washington fleet, meanwhile, landed 14.29 million pounds at similar ex-vessel prices for revenues of $7.15 million. PacFIN showed no harvest data for California as of Dec. 1.
Looking back, the Oregon trawlers closed out their 2019 season with a harvest of 26.9 million pounds, about 9 million pounds less than they caught in 2018. The good news is that the 74 cents per pound the received put average ex-vessel prices at the third highest in the history of the fishery, which put the fleet revenues at $19.9 million.
Of interest to management biologists and the industry are the catch-per-unit-of-effort rates. In 2019, those ranked third lowest since 2004, meaning trawlers had to strain more water to catch the shrimp they caught. The CPUE during the 2020 season improved, according to the numbers Groth had seen.
“CPUE remained high until the end of the 2020 season, which must be a good indication for population holdover,” he says.
As for the 2021 season, which will begin on April 1 and run through Oct. 31, trawlers can hope for a season on par with last year’s.
“We did see some zero-age shrimp and definitely had a good age 1 class this year,” says Groth. “Those will be age 1 and 2 respectively next year, and they were both stronger than average.
“Our environmental indicators are good; so I’d expect a decent season next year, hopefully anywhere near as good as 2020, without the covid and the politics.”
The biotech blitz to stop the spread of the coronavirus has conservationists worried about a little-known front-line worker: the horseshoe crab.
The creature's milky-blue blood is a key ingredient in tests used to ensure drugs aren't contaminated with endotoxins that could turn otherwise curative medicines deadly.
Hundreds of thousands of horseshoe crabs are harvested off the Atlantic coast annually to make limulus amebocyte lysate, or LAL, tests, thousands of which are required to ensure the safety of each injectable drug or implantable device brought to market. Vaccines and therapies to prevent or cure COVID-19 are no exception.
Some say that means American pharmaceutical regulators should step in and finally embrace a synthetic alternative to the LAL test and ensure horseshoe crabs and the shorebirds that rely on them aren't doomed by the herculean effort to stop COVID-19.
It's not just about the ecosystem. Backers of the synthetic endotoxin test say it's foolhardy to rely on a single animal for such an important function.
"It is the regulators who are delaying this," says Jeak Ling Ding, a microbiologist at the National University of Singapore who developed the synthetic test. "But when the last horseshoe crab is bled and the rest have died off, what will you do?"
'Thank a horseshoe crab'
Found in the cellular walls of some bacteria, endotoxins can cause fevers, septic shock or even death when they enter the bloodstream. That means anything entering the body, be it an insulin injection or a pacemaker keeping a heart pumping, must first be tested for them.
Endotoxin tests must be run on not only drugs or implants, but anything they come in contact with, including the needles that inject them, the vials that contain them and the water used to produce them.
Until the 1970s, endotoxin tests were simple but time-consuming: Drugs and medical devices were first tested on rabbits, while researchers waited to see whether the animals would fall ill.
The discovery that horseshoe crab blood quickly clots around endotoxins was a game changer for the industry, and LAL tests relying on the blood became standard practice. The biomedical bleeding industry now makes more than $60 million annually.
"Any person who has ever had a shot that is alive today can thank a horseshoe crab," said Allen Burgenson, a global subject matter expert for testing solutions at Swiss biotech company Lonza, which manufactures both the LAL and synthetic endotoxin tests. "If you don't think twice about going to CVS to get your flu shot, the horseshoe crab has made that possible."
At 14 million, American horseshoe crab populations are relatively stable, especially compared with endangered Asian varieties.
Biomedical bleeding companies and conservationists have long been at odds over whether the pharmaceutical industry poses a significant risk to Atlantic coast horseshoe crabs.
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Once caught in the ocean, the animals are brought to laboratories where scientists fold them in half to slip needles behind their shells and into their tubular hearts. The animals are drained of one-third of their blood before being returned to the ocean.
Biomedical bleeding companies like Lonza say the process does minimal harm to the horseshoe crabs, which are never bled two years in a row and are inspected for health before being bled.
"It's just like the Red Cross — you can't donate blood if you're not in good health," Burgenson said.
They also claim that just 5% of horseshoe crabs die in the process, though conservationists have estimated death rates at closer to 30%.
The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission's Horseshoe Crab Management Board splits the difference, estimating that 15% die annually. That would mean that of the 740,000 horseshoe crabs harvested for bleeding in 2019, more than 100,000 died.
That number is dwarfed by the 500,000 horseshoe crabs harvested that year for bait in the whelk and eel fisheries.
Indeed, though the management board sets quotas on commercial bait harvests of horseshoe crabs, it has never limited the biomedical harvest, agreeing with industry arguments that bleeding is not a large enough threat to regulate.
That's despite board regulations saying the body should consider limiting biomedical bleeding if mortality surpasses 57,000 annually — a threshold that has been exceeded for 12 of the past 13 years.
The lack of regulation concerns conservationists, many of whom have also fought against using horseshoe crabs for bait.
They also note that the biomedical harvest has skyrocketed in recent years, up almost 50% between 2019 and the prior year, and blame the decimation of Asian horseshoe crab populations, by both bleeding and bait industries, for putting even more pressure on the American variety.
"There aren't many sources of horseshoe crabs," said Deborah Cramer, author of "The Narrow Edge," a book about shorebirds and horseshoe crabs.
'Ripple effect'
That, in turn, could imperil the Atlantic coastal ecosystem, where horseshoe crabs emerge each spring to lay thousands of eggs on beaches. The eggs are a key source of food along the Atlantic flyway, with an estimated 425,000 birds, including endangered shorebirds like the red knot, converging on Delaware Bay each spring as they migrate north.
"There is a ripple effect across the ecosystem landscape," said David Mizrahi, vice president of research and monitoring at New Jersey Audubon. "Biomedical mortality isn't 100%, but nonetheless there is an impact."
Conservationists and biomedical bleeding companies similarly disagree about how production and deployment of coronavirus vaccines and therapies could affect the crab.
John Dubczak, an executive director at LAL test producer Charles River Laboratories, says the race to develop COVID-19 vaccines will have an insignificant impact on the species.
Health officials estimate 5 billion doses of a vaccine will be needed to stop the virus's spread. Dubczak said producing that many doses would require just 600,000 LAL tests to be performed — a number that "amounts to less than a single normal day's production for the three LAL manufacturers in the United States."
Burgenson echoed those statistics.
But conservationists say the biomedical bleeding industry is underestimating the pandemic's impact on horseshoe crabs, because it's not just the final vaccines that must be tested for endotoxins but anything used to produce them — including water, vials and needles.
And while just two vaccines have been approved to fight the disease, there are nearly 200 other vaccines or therapies in development to fight against the coronavirus — all of which require endotoxin tests to prove their safety.
"I can only expect that the pressure on horseshoe crab populations will increase. It's hard to imagine that the math would suggest otherwise," said Mizrahi. "But there's no need for it, given that there is a synthetic alternative that doesn't harm the environment."
The synthetic test, called recombinant Factor C (rFC), was made by cloning horseshoe crab DNA responsible for its blood's clotting endotoxin response, and has been available since 2003.
Ding and her lab partner, Bow Ho, set out to find an alternative endotoxin test in the 1980s, when the prices of Asian LAL tests were climbing due to the decline of horseshoe crabs there.
Until 2016, Lonza was the only manufacturer of rFC. And some skeptical backers of the synthetic test argued that the company wasn't doing enough to push for drug makers to adopt it. After all, as a producer of LAL tests, too, Lonza had seemingly little to gain.
But Burgenson said that those accusations are unfounded and that he struggled to convince pharmaceutical companies and regulators alike to embrace rFC when Lonza was the only company making it.
Drug companies, he said, rebuffed offers for Lonza to do all the validation work proving rFC was safe. Meanwhile, regulators questioned whether it was wise to allow an endotoxin test produced by just one company.
"I don't know what more we could be expected to do," he said.
But with two rFC producers today, only one pharmaceutical company has actually brought drugs to market using the synthetic test.
Eli Lilly and Co. blazed the trail for rFC adoption, largely due to supply chain concerns about relying on horseshoe crabs.
The company realized that its dependence on LAL tests was unsustainable in 2013 while planning an insulin-manufacturing plant in China, where horseshoe crab populations were depleted.
Since then, Eli Lilly has "drawn a line in the sand," according to its endotoxin expert, Jay Bolden. New products manufactured since 2016 have all used rFC, rather than the LAL test, and Eli Lilly is in the process of switching all endotoxin testing to the synthetic method.
"For us, we thought it was worth it to take the extra effort to do it, so it was a proactive change for us instead of reacting to a problem down the road," said Bolden, who declined to share how much it cost to swap out endotoxin test equipment. "You have all this reliance on a single animal that is not doing too well. There is a better way to do it, is what it comes down to."
'Fight against the world'
Medical regulators globally are beginning to agree.
European regulators announced last summer that they would begin accepting drugs produced with rFC in 2021, and regulators in Japan and China are expected to follow suit.
America's regulatory landscape is more complicated.
While the Food and Drug Administration is charged with approving new drugs, it largely outsources its regulations regarding the manufacturing process to a nonprofit body called the U.S. Pharmacopeia.
The U.S. Pharmacopeia has flip-flopped over rFC. The group signaled last spring that it would issue standards to place the synthetic test on equal footing with the LAL test. But it backtracked in the fall, releasing draft guidance that required companies using rFC to show it is as effective as the LAL test by essentially using both when developing medicines.
The exact impact of the U.S. Pharmacopeia's decision is unclear.
The FDA in 2012 issued its own guidance saying it would accept drugs produced using the rFC tests if companies supported those decisions with hefty data decisions. So far, only Eli Lilly has used that ability, with the FDA approving three of the company's drugs — including a new COVID-19 therapy in November — that used the synthetic tests.
The FDA has also signaled that it would accept drugs produced under European regulations, potentially allowing more drugs produced using the synthetic tests this year. And at least one company is examining its options, with vaccine manufacturer Sanofi Pasteur publishing a paper this spring finding that rFC and LAL tests are equivalent.
But many believe the pharmaceutical industry at large will wait for the U.S. Pharmacopeia to act before adopting rFC.
Bolden said it's "all about perception."
"We certainly blazed the trail and showed how to do it, but it takes extra work to validate your method compared to the LAL, and a lot of pharmaceutical companies aren't going to rock the boat if they don't have to."
Phillipe Gadal, a regulatory adviser with the French biotech company bioMérieux, which began producing rFC a few years ago, says the U.S. Pharmacopeia really sets standards globally, because the American drug market is so large.
"A pharma company might say, 'Well, we want to go to rFC, but we want to wait for the U.S. Pharmacopeia,'" he said.
BioMérieux has been working to push the FDA and the U.S. Pharmacopeia toward rFC, petitioning the FDA this spring to write its own regulations clearly stating that the synthetic is as safe as the LAL test and push the U.S. Pharmacopeia to do the same.
"With the FDA's leadership amid the COVID-19 pandemic, there is an immediate opportunity to innovate and rapidly move away from the use of rabbits and horseshoe crabs to the use of rFC," it says.
The FDA has said it cannot decide on the petition.
Burgenson, who believes bioMérieux has been too aggressive in advocating for rFC, says he's skeptical that the coronavirus is a convincing reason to move to the synthetic test.
"When we switched to crabs from rabbits, there was a clear business case for drugmakers because the rabbit tests were so time-consuming and expensive," he said. "The only real case to switch to rFC is if you don't want to use animals in your endotoxin tests, and that's not enough for industry to pressure the regulators."
But Gadal remains hopeful that the FDA and the U.S. Pharmacopeia will come around, noting the progress already made globally.
"I think you cannot fight against the world for too long," he said.
Cramer agrees.
"Do I think that COVID-19 will be the thing that forces this decision? I really don't know," she said. "But we need to move to rFC because of the longer-term challenges to horseshoe crabs, and whether coronavirus is what gets us there, to my mind, doesn't really matter because we have to go there."
Finally! Dungeness crabbers are now out in full force and these sweet, delicious little crustaceans are ready for your table. That means you can make a Sunday trip to Bodega Bay to grab the freshest creatures that have gone from crab pot to boiling pot in a matter of hours. Not days. Or even worse, weeks or months in a freezer.
It’s worth the journey to the coast not just for fresh crab but for all the tasty goodness along the way, and to directly support fishermen (and women) who have been hit hard by the long delay to crab season.
Bite Club spent most of Sunday afternoon winding our way around the area, eating some pretty dang good seafood. Here’s what you can’t miss.
Carol Anello’s clam chowder at the Spud Point Crab Company in Bodega Bay. (John Burgess)
Ginochio’s Kitchen: Hello to my new favorite Dungeness crab sandwich. Though I usually prefer a soft roll with crab meat nestled within, Ginochio’s buttery, griddled slices of white bread hold huge chunks of freshly picked crab and a slice of melted cheese. It’s a messy affair and resplendently rich, so you could probably split one with a friend or take some home for later, especially since the chowder here is required. We love the soft scallops and clams dotted throughout the chowder, and the big plus is that seafood outweighs potatoes. It’s one of the best chowders on the coast. Next time we’ll definitely try the caramel bacon monkey bread. Plus, they have some great wines, beer and cider, including Claypool Cellars, that are hard to find elsewhere. 1410 Bay Flat Road, Bodega Bay, 707-377-4359, ginochioskitchen.com
Anello Family Crab and Seafood: Follow the bright orange crab signs to this dock-to-table family crabbing operation. Though we usually hit up Spud Point first, we decided to try this restaurant pop-up and crab boil instead. Giant live crabs are pulled out of the tank and immediately cooked and put on ice. We’ve never had a crab this fresh, sweet and delicious, ever. Ever. Cooked crab runs for about $12.50 a pound, which isn’t the cheapest, but it’s worth every penny. After a giant crab sandwich, we weren’t hungry for their hot food, but a take-out window serves chowder, sandwiches and more. Weekends only. 1820 Westshore Road, Bodega Bay, 707-232-8002, anellofamilyseafood.com
Spud Point: Always jammed, always great. A crab sammie on a soft roll and chowder comes with plenty of garlicy goodness. Owned by Tony and Carol Anello. 1910 Westshore Road, Bodega Bay, 707-875-9472, spudpointcrabco.com
Fisherman’s Cove: Barbecue oysters are always my favorite here, but their crab sandwich on toasted ciabatta is another must-have. 1850 Bay Flat Road, Bodega Bay, 707-377-4238, fishermanscovebodegabay.com
Fishetarian Fish Market: Best fish and chips, according to my dad. So there you go. They also have crab cakes, tacos and whole Dungeness crab with melted butter ready for eating. Don’t miss the super-fresh poke and rockfish ceviche. 599 Highway 1 S., Bodega Bay, 707-875-9092, fishetarianfishmarket.com
Huria’s: On the docket for this weekend is Huria’s, best known for their wood-fired Napoletana pizzas that come in flavors so dreamy you’ll have a hard time choosing. Start with the Margherita, the standard of any great pizzaiolo, with simple San Marzano tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella, basil, oregano and olive oil. Move on to the Bodega, with Bechamel sauce, clams, mozzarella and garlic and the Chateau Rouge with Havarti, fresh mozzarella, smoked and caramelized onions, cremini mushrooms, Parmesan and dried herbs with garlic oil. There’s plenty more to love, including house-smoked salmon on sourdough toast, wood-fired butternut squash with ricotta and octopus with caramelized tomato salsa. Takeout only. Inside the Pelican Plaza, 1400 N. Highway 1, Bodega Bay, 707-377-4721, hurias.com
Now that we’re in the clear for more outdoor dining, stay tuned for even more coastal eating adventures.
Editor’s Note: Travel, dining and wine tasting can be complicated right now. Use our inspirational ideas to plan ahead for your next outing, be it this week or next year. If you visit restaurants, wineries, and other businesses during the pandemic, remember to call ahead, make reservations, wear a mask and social distance.
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