RECIPES: How To Cut The Crab

When Dungeness crab season starts on the West Coast (usually between November and December, depending on location), there’s a mad dash by consumers to cook and eat as many fresh live crabs as possible before it ends. Steaming whole crabs and cleaning them might sound intimidating, but the process is relatively easy: Just boil the crabs, remove a few select pieces of the shell, clean out a few squidgy bits, and rinse. The real fun is cracking and picking them. Make sure to have seafood crackers or small hammers on hand to get at all of the sweet, flaky meat. If you find yourself with leftover crabmeat, use it in Crab Cakes or Crab and Fontina Stuffed Mushrooms.

Special equipment: Once your crab is cooked and cleaned, extract the meat by cracking the claws, legs, and body open with small hammers or seafood crackers like these.

Game plan: Fresh live crab should be purchased and cooked the same day—the crabs can only be stored in the refrigerator for a few hours once taken out of their holding tanks.

If your crab is not exactly 2 pounds, calculate about 7 to 8 minutes of steaming time per pound (after the water returns to a boil). If you’re cooking more than one crab at a time, calculate the average weight by taking the total weight of the crabs and dividing by the number of crabs you have. Use this average weight to determine your total steaming time, about 7 to 8 minutes per pound. And be sure to use an extra-large pot with a tightfitting lid.

For the crab:

1 tablespoon kosher salt
1 (2-pound) whole live Dungeness crab
For serving:
Aioli
Warm melted butter
Cucumber Mignonette

Fill a large pot with 1 inch of water and stir in the salt. (Be sure your pot has a tightfitting lid.) Place a steamer rack inside of the pot. (If you don’t have a steamer rack, lightly bunch a long piece of foil so that it looks like a rope. Then make a figure eight out of the foil rope and set it in the pot.)

Bring the water to a boil over high heat. Using tongs, pick up the crab, grasping it from behind and placing one arm of the tongs on the belly and the other on the back with the legs on either side. Place the crab back side up in the steamer rack.  Cover and return the water to a full boil, about 1 minute. Reduce the heat to medium high and steam until the crab is cooked through, about 15 minutes more.

Using tongs, remove the crab to a colander and rinse under cold water until cool enough to handle.

Place the crab belly side up on a cutting board with the face closest to you. Using your hands or the tip of a knife, lift the triangular piece of shell at the tail of the crab (the apron), break it off, and discard.

Pick up the crab with your hands, place a thumb in the hole where the apron was, and pull in one motion to remove the top shell (the carapace) from the rest of the body. Discard the carapace.

Place the crab belly side up on the cutting board with the tail closest to you. Remove and discard the soft, pointy gills from the body. Break off and discard the mouthpiece (the mandibles).

Pull away any loose fragments from the body and discard. Rinse away any viscera under cold water.

Place the crab on the cutting board back side up and cut in half from face to tail through the middle of the body.  If desired, cut the crab into smaller pieces by slicing between the legs, making sure to cut through the body.  To extract the meat, use seafood crackers or small hammers to crack open the claws, legs, and body. Serve with aioli, melted butter, or cucumber mignonette for dipping.

This post is originally taken from Christine Gallary

SEO: I Follow Segment!

Hai fellows! I decided to create this segment because as you can see i have only few follower to my blog.  So, today want to invite you all to join my blog, my facebook fan page and my twitter.  Then, i also will follow your blog, facebook fan page and your twitter (if you have any). Ok it is very simple, together we create this win win situation in blogging! So, lets start from mine: Please follow step below:

Step 1)  Join this blog Syadzila Mustafa 

Step 2)  Follow my twitter 

Step 3)  Add Dan Follow Facebook Norsyadzila Mustafa

Step 4)  Live a comment below with your link, so i can follow your's too.

Thanks for time reading this post, i am really appreciate if you join me in this I Follow activities!

My Life My Love: How to Promote Your Blog and Increase Traffic by Wasim Ismail

Blogging is an enjoyable habit especially for those who love writing and expressing themselves to others. Many people even make a living out of it. However, gaining profits in writing blogs is not an easy task especially if you are just starting your blogging career. Other than writing relevant content, driving traffic to your website is also essential and it is not an easy task. It takes time and persistence to build online history and gain consistent traffic. No traffic, no money.

To increase traffic to your blog, you have to be effective in your website promotion activities. This may include your blog appearance, SEO, social media promotions and email marketing.

See below:
Blog Appearance

1. Blogging Platform: There are several good and free blogging platforms available online. Most famous platforms are WordPress, Joomla, Blogger and Drupal. WordPress is the most preferred platform by many bloggers and it is also originally designed for blogging. But if you want to put some dynamic functionality like social networking and ecommerce features, you may consider using Joomla and Drupal.On the other hand, it is also possible if you want to create your own blog site from raw. Hence, it will take you more time unlike setting up a site using WordPress, Joomla or Drupal. Also, in using either one of these three options, several modules and plugins are already available for your convenience plus worldwide support communities that are willing to help you out with your platform issues.
2. Color Theme: Your choice of colors is very important for your blog appearance. Through colors, you can trigger different emotions of your readers. Most blogs tend to use light colors for their backgrounds, and dark colors for the texts, (such as White & Black) this makes the content more readable for general users.
3. Navigational Layout: Make your layout navigational. Organize your links and blocks well. Make your recent posts and most famous articles are accessible to your readers. Study and experiment well for your ad positions. Also, putting them in the right places can make your number of click through higher.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

1. Relevant Content for Your Focused Niche: When we say relevant content, it means content that is helpful to readers.The web is continuously being updated every day, where users are continuously looking for good content that relates to them, aim to publish new content on a daily, or weekly biases that will link to your audience.
2. Link Building: The number of back links is essential if you want higher page ranks. Like voting system, search engines will determine your website relevance with the number of link presence you have on the web.. These links can be achieved in various ways, Submitting to bookmarks is an effective link building activity, or by writing guest articles, or even networking on social media websites.
3. Public Relations: Public relations like press release and article submissions can also help you promote your site, increase back links and expose more your website.
4. Ping: Submitting to ping sites like Ping-O-Matic everytime you made changes in your site can trigger the search engines to visit your website and index your new pages.

Social Media Promotions

1. Twitter: Recently, Google started indexing twitter pages. Therefore, whatever you tweet in connection to your website will affect your online presence. Be creative with your tweets, add your keywords and link them to your website. However, re-tweet other helpful posts also to gain more followers.
2. Facebook: Facebook is now the largest social networking site on the web. Everyday billions of users are interacting on this site, which is an enough reason to invest time and promote your websites on Facebook.
3. Other Online Community and Blogging Sites: Aside from Twitter and Facebook, investing time to other blogging sites and online communities like forums and other social networking sites can gain more exposures to your websites. Prevent spamming, post relevant comments that would help others. With this, you are not only promoting your blog, but you are also building relationships to your peer bloggers.
4. Commenting on other blogs: Create a list of blogs that you would read regularly, and which relate to your business. Aim to leave useful comments on articles that are published on these blog, be creative with your comments, by writing comments that would provide extra value to the post and readers.
5. Forums: A good way of building your presence and getting users to your blog, is by using forums. Register with forums within your niche, and answer few questions that the users ask, do this regularly, over time you would build your brand awareness and start to drive traffic to your site. When answering questions, be as helpful as you can, and provide answers that would be effective and helpful to all reading that question.

Email Marketing

1. Pitch Page for Mailing List: Sending emails to people who do not give you any permission to do so is loud and clear spamming. Do not do this. Create a pitch page or pitch block in your website where your readers can submit their email address to subscribe to your newsletters. You can get embed codes for this by using tools like Aweber autoresponder or FeedBurner.
2. Good Layout and Content: Sending an attractive and corporate looking e-newsletter can prevent your recipients to hit the “spam” button. Be creative with your layout and give them good content. Put links directing to your website. Also, offering some games, rewards or other promotions can be a good call to action to your readers to visit your blog.

Guest Blogging

Last but not the least also, have a presence as a guest blogger on various authority and related sites of your industry. As guest blogging is more than writing a blog post for some other blog, it has got many benefits, which can improve your image as a blogger and also help you promote your own blog by reaching out to communities established by these blogs.

Best is to write guest posts for other blogs and also invite and publish guest posts on your own blog. This gives maximum exposure to your blog and helps you reach out multifold on the web by opening doors for other SEO and social media benefits attached to guest blogging. Hence, this can be termed as a win-win situation where the blogger and the blog both benefit in various ways.

There are so many things that you may do to gain maximum exposure for your blog. Also, give time to research for useful tools to automate your blog sharing and make your promotion easier. Pursue the marketing and outreach of your blog keeping abreast with new ideas and methods on the web as internet marketing keeps evolving and every time you come across a new platform consider how you can portray your business.

My Life My Love: Promote Your Blog By Blogger

I found this is very important for us as blogger to know, so i repost it here for my my guideline in blogging. This is in no way a science or guarantee; it's simply a few suggestions with which many bloggers have found success.

1. Set your blog to Send Pings. When this setting is activated, your blog will be included in various "recently updated" lists on the web as well as other blog-related services.
2. Activate Your Navbar. Do this and you might start to see the effects right away! One of the features on the Blogger Navbar is a button called NextBlog - click it to visit the next Navbar-enabled blog. 
3. Install Email This Post. If you use Email This Post on your blog, people will be able to forward your posts to friends. This may not have an immediate impact on your site stats but it enables others to publicize your blog for you.
4. Turn on Post Pages. By publishing every post as its very own web page with Post Pages, you ensure that your entries are way more link-able and more attractive to search engines.
5. Turn on your site feed. When people subscribe to your site feed in their newsreaders, they're very likely going to read your post.
6. Add your blog to Blogger's listings. When you add your blog to our listings it shows up in Nextblog, Recently Updated, and other places. It's like opting-in to traffic.
7. Write quality content and do it well. If your "style" is bad writing, worse grammar, no punctuation, and an ugly design, that might be okay for a niche crowd. But the idea here is to achieve mass appeal, so fix yourself up a bit.
8. Publish regular updates. Simple: the more you blog, the more traffic you'll get. 
9. Think of your audience. A good way to build an audience is to speak to one in particular. When you keep your audience in mind, your writing gains focus. Focus goes a long way toward repeat visitors.
10. Keep search engines in mind. There are a few things you can do to make your blog more search engine friendly. Use post titles and post page archiving. This will automatically give each of your post pages an intelligent name based on the title of your post. Also, try to be descriptive when you blog. A well crafted post about something very specific can end up very near the top results of a search.
11. Keep your posts and paragraphs short. Strive for succinct posts that pump pertinent new information into the blogosphere and move on. Keep it short and sweet so visitors can pop in, read up, and click on. 
12. Put your blog URL in your email signature. Think of how many forwarded emails you've seen in your day, and just imagine the possibilities.
13. Sumbit your address to blog search sites and directories. People look for blog content at Technorati every day, are you on their list? You should be. Submit your blog's url to Technorati, Daypop, Blogdex, Popdex, and any other site of that ilk you come across.
14. Link to other blogs. Links are the currency of the blogosphere and it takes money to make money so start linking. 
15. Install a blogroll. It's a very simple yet effective social networking scheme and it has the same result as a simple link if not stronger: traffic! So if you don't have one yet, sign up for a blogroll and get that link-list going.
16. Be an active commenter. This is in the same vein as linking. Most comment systems also provide a way for you to leave a link back to your blog which begs a visit at the very least. So if you feel inspired, leave a comment or two in your blog travels. It behooves you.
17. Enable Following on your blog. Following a is a great way to keep your friends updated on the latest activity on your blog. New blogs will have this blog feature enabled by default, but for older blogs you will have to enable it from the Layout | Page Elements tab.

How to Add Facebook Like Box to Your Website

You would be more prefer to engage with social media and broadcast your blogging or website updates for readers to stay up-to-date with your content through preferred social media. If we narrow to Facebook, lately we have been discussing about creating Facebook fan page for your site. Moreover Facebook provides you a social plugin - Facebook Like Box, to represent your Facebook fan page on your site and let your readers easily subscribe to your updates. Wanna add it to your site too?

Facebook Like Box is a popular social plugin you could find almost on all blogs or websites. It will enable users to like your fan page in one click without visiting it, see users already liked it including their friends and read recent posts from your fan page. So you would like to add it for your site and gain more likes to your Facebook fan page while letting Facebook users to stay in touch with your site updates through Facebook. Here you can find how to add Facebook Like Box social plugin with further customization.

Before You Go:  Unless if you implemented Facebook JavaScript SDK in your site, you have to add it before you proceed with steps. Read How to Implement Facebook JavaScript SDK on Your Website and implement suitable JavaScript SDK for you.

Steps:

1. You just need to add this code to your website. Either use XFBML code or HTML5 code as you prefer.
Note: If you are a Blogger user, add your plugin code snippet via HTML/JavaScript element.

XFBML Markup

[URL of Your Facebook Fan Page]" width="[Width in Pixels]" height="[Height in Pixels]" colorscheme="[Like Box Color]" show_faces="[Enable/Disable Showing Faces of Fans]" border_color="[Color of Border]" stream="[Enable/Disable Stream]" header="[Enable/Disable Header]">

Note: The XFBML markup of this plugin may not support earlier versions of Internet Explorer. In order to enhance compatibility with older Internet Explorer versions, add below XML namespace to your root HTML tag.

xmlns:fb="http://ogp.me/ns/fb#"

i.e:

HTML5 Markup

[URL of Your Facebook Fan Page]" data-width="[Width in Pixels]" data-height="[Height in Pixels]" data-show-faces="[Enable/Disable Showing Faces of Fans]" data-border-color="[Color of Border]" data-stream="[Enable/Disable Stream]" data-header="[Enable/Disable Header]">

Color Indication Information
.....- URL of Your Facebook Fan Page
.....- Width of Facebook Like Box Plugin in Pixels

.....- Height of Facebook Like Box Plugin in Pixels

Just specify height of your like box in pixels. Else you can leave it blank and let plugin decide the height automatically.
.....- Color Scheme of Like Box

Here you are eligible to select the color scheme of the Facebook like box. Either specify light or dark here as you prefer.
.....- Show Profile Pictures of Fans

You can show off profile pictures of your fans through your like box. Specify true if you would like to display faces, or else specify false here.
.....- Color of Facebook Like Box Border

Specify border color of the like box here, either using hex color value or just specify color name.
.....- Display Steam of Your Fan Page

Specify true if you would like to display stream of your public fan page or else specify false.
.....- Facebook Like Box Header

You can elect to display default header with label 'Find Us on Facebook' here. Either specify true or false as you prefer.