DC Fish Market

This past weekend, I checked off another place on my “must-visit” list–a short, but eventful trip to DC’s fish market.  Last weekend, some of our friends suggested heading down to the waterfront on Saturday evening to pick up some freshly steamed Maryland blue crabs for dinner.  I was looking forward to it all week!

As a kid, my family and I used to head down there all the time and somehow in the past few years, I’ve forgotten all about it.  It is essentially a big outdoor market devoted entirely to fresh seafood.

Unfortunately, it ended up being a short visit, since the market was complete packed and there were no parking spaces anywhere to be found (which essentially meant Connor had to drive around in circles until our order was ready).  But I’m already looking forward to heading back on another weekend soon! 

Once we got to the market, we headed over to one of the many stands where you can buy fresh crabs to bring home, or better yet, steamed to order.  There were tons of crabs to choose from (female vs. male, small, medium, large, jumbo, etc.)–after debating our options a bit, we ended up getting two dozen large crabs, to share between the four of us.

While the crabs were cooking, we took a brief walk to the other stalls to check out all that the market had to offer.  I was really impressed by the range of seafood and fish available!

It’s always nice to step away from the grocery store buying “experience” and actually see fish in their true, whole form–guts and all.  Plus, it provides me with a chance to practice my knife skills!  (And it tends to be a better value.)

They had everything from fresh octopus, porgies, salmon heads, massive tiger shrimp, shark (!), carp, snapper, Virginia clams the size of my hand–and much more.   I did end up buying some fish, which I’ll be writing a post about later this week!  

Soon enough, the lady at our stall was handing us our huge brown bag (which luckily was within a much-larger garbage bag–for transportation’s sake) of freshly steamed and seasoned crabs.  We ended up taking them back to our friends’ apartment to enjoy with cold beer, fresh guacamole and chips, and melted butter.

Even though the whole crab-eating process can be a bit tedious at times, it is always so much fun!  We each ate about six crabs each–and I was pretty stuffed by the end of the meal (most likely from the chips and guacamole).

Whenever, you end up finishing dinner and look down to see this, you know you’ve had a good time.  Even the occasional crab juice in your eye doesn’t really faze you–it’s all in good (dirty) fun.

Until next time!  And trust me, there will definitely be a next time…

Hope you all had a great weekend!