Saint Patrick's Day!

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day to you!

My mom’s side of the family is 100% Irish (OK, Irish-American, from Chicago) so I have a lot of Irish pride. (And Chicago pride.) To celebrate, I wanted to showcase some Irish crabs:

• Brown crab Cancer pagurus

• Green crab (Hey-hey! Go green!) Carcinus maenas – see Bear Grylls munch a live one here, poor critter (the crab, not Bear. I mean, really, surviving Ireland? Step 1: find pub. Step 2: order a pint...)

• Velvet crab Necora puber

• Spider crab Maja squinado

photo credits: C. pagurus, C. maenas, and N. puber taken off of Cork by jb1562 from Flickr;

M. squinado on  a lobster pot from connemara.net

Ireland’s inshore fishery (within 12 miles of the coast) also includes lobster Homarus gammarus, Dublin bay prawns, shrimp, crayfish, mussels, scallops, clams, and whelks. The most common counties that participate in these inshore fisheries are Cork, Kerry, Donegal and Galway. My family is from County Cork (the Mahoney’s), so I’d like to think that maybe they feasted on some of these guys back in the day.

Portán go Brách!