Angelika It's really not easy to find a present for Michael, as he has the bad habit of buying everything himself, especially as short a week before his birthday or Christmas.

He's reading books, but exclusively as e-books, and instead of listening to CDs, he prefers streaming services like "Spotify" or "Rhapsody". That makes finding presents for him extremely difficult, and I've been surprising him with joint adventures instead.

Because Michael likes to cook and I once enjoyed taking cooking classes a long long time ago, my gift to him this year was a cooking class for the both of us. After researching quite a bit, I found "Jordan's Kitchen" just around the corner from us in the Mission neighborhood. Jordan, a famous chef, offers four hour classes teaching how to prepare a four course meal. Since Michael and I love "Dungeness Crab", and we've always wanted to know how to cook them starting from scratch, so I signed up for the "Crab Cookout".

Dungeness Crab are native to the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean close to the U.S. west coast, harvesting season is typically between November and June. They are truly gargantuan in size, the massive body harness measures between six and eight inches in diameter and the whole crab weighs about 2 pounds. Our cooking class happened at the end of January, there were fourteen students and chef Jordan told us everything there is to know about cooking crab. We had such a great time! At first I had some doubts whether I would dare to grab a living crab and place it in boiling water, but we learned that you need to snatch the crab from behind so that it can't get your fingers with its claws and bravely I gave in to group pressure.

Interestingly enough, the clawed creatures first seemed quite apathic, but started fidgeting as soon as we picked them up. When quickly submerged in boiling water, they stopped immediately, thankfully. We were sipping some wine during the class, and the participants were all pretty relaxed. Jordan also demonstrated how to take out the inedible parts of the cooked crab. We removed the upper plate, and took out intestines like the lungs. There's some meat in the crab body as well, which can be pulled out after cutting the carcass in quarters, but the main source are the crab's claws and its eight feet, and getting to the delicious meat inside requires cracking their hard outer shells first.

Here's the list of the four courses we cooked: Dungeness crab meat in coconut milk on cucumber slices; Bucatini pasta with crab meat; roasted crab in orange and garlic butter; apple and pear compote with cornflower croutons. What was nice was that all participants cooked and later ate as one big team. And I received a personal training from Jordan on how to use a chef's knife! Highly recommended class!

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