I decided to make something I hadn’t made in ages for this weekend’s Thanksgiving celebration, hot crab dip. It’s usually a crowd pleaser and something a little different from turkey and stuffing to serve as a starter.

I opened my cookbook and noticed the sidebar running down the right column of the page and decided to give it a quick read.

“Did you know that a crab has the ability to regenerate a claw?”

I didn’t and I wish I could rewind four seconds and choose to focus on the recipe and not the cutesie blurb down the side.

Do the cookbook writers realize we look to recipes because we plan to make and ultimately eat what we make and if I think about the animal as a living being, one that I now understand could potentially grow a claw from within my intestines and protrude through my belly button like in some horror movie, I would be more inclined to toss their book in the garbage and move onto the next?

“Crab hunters adopted the practice of breaking off only one of the crab’s two claws and tossing the creature back into the sea.” Slicing lemon, shredding cheese, paying no attention to the description of cruelty to the most important ingredient in my dip jumping off the page in front of me.

“Incredibly, the handicapped crab……” Seriously, do I want to ingest something with the word “handicapped” in its description? Isn’t that a bit like choosing to eat mad cow?

Light Worcestershire sauce, I will distract myself by searching with a magnifying glass for the word “light” on the label.

“If really unlucky, it suffers through the whole ordeal again.”

Clearly it did, it’s being minced for my dip.

Next time, I think I would prefer to read these fascinating facts in National Geographic and what a tasty treat crab legs are when dipped in warmed butter from my cook book.