Getting (Your Hands) Dirty on Valentine's Day

About author / Amy Powell

World traveler; gourmet 30 minute meals; lover of exotic ingredients; winner on FoodTV's Chefs vs City; graduate French Culinary Institute. Her recipes will tantalize your taste buds.

Almost everything about Valentine’s Day is dainty and fragile: balloons that pop, flowers that wilt, chocolates that melt, hearts that can fill with hope and moments later crush with disappointment. In no way am I out to be a Negative Nancy, it is just that all these things, even the food we are encouraged to eat, somehow seems out of touch with the lusty desire and hearty appetite of a true romance.

So before you pressure your beau to take you out to an eight course dinner of architectural food topped with foam, or spend hours in the kitchen yourself attempting to assemble a multi-page, 20-plus ingredient recipe just to have your girlfriend nibble at the tip of her fork, consider that sometimes the food that sparks a passionate fire is the kind that requires getting your hands, well, a little dirty.

If there is an upper echelon of aphrodisiac foods, certainly seafood, in particular oysters, must sit near the very top. If oysters are a sexy food it has nothing to do with their looks. Raw on the half shell, it is hard to believe that a small gray blob could lift a libido. So if it is not the looks, maybe then it is the process. Eating a raw oyster is a tactile experience: best when the half shell is held in the hand, squeezed with a touch of lemon or sprinkle of mignonette, the whole shell brought to the lips, at which point the succulent bivalve and its briny liquor is slurped and sucked down with hardly a chew. Any eating that draws attention to the lips is sexy eating indeed.

To the sexy seafood category I would like to add crab to the list of hands-on, messy foods that get you dirty in all the right ways. Conveniently, February is the peak of Dungeness crab season, making it the perfect opportunity to test the turn-on nature of this leggy ocean creature. Most fish mongers will steam the crab for you, crack it and clean it, making home cooking a simple matter of a quick reheat, and then some action from a few nimble hands.

I like to fire up a wok with some oil and toss the pieced crab in with a few cloves of chopped garlic and a couple of tablespoons of garlic chili sauce for a fiery kick. After a few short minutes of crab tossing, the whole thing is transferred to a platter and topped with a shower of chopped cilantro. One whole crab is a hearty appetizer or light main course for two people. Try not to get excited watching your girlfriend suck sweet crab from the shell. When your temperature starts to rise it’s probably not just the chili sauce talking.

With all the salad ordering and fish picking, it would not be a surprise if a man found a woman who could wrap her hands around a juicy burger and just dig in to be a supreme object of attraction (Remember those Carl’s Junior commercials with a bikini-clad Paris Hilton biting into a Western Bacon Cheeseburger?). And yes, a drippy, juicy burger can even be romantic! My best friend went on her first date with her now fiancé to a diner in San Francisco famous for its burgers. Every anniversary, including the one where he proposed, they celebrate over two delicious, dripping burgers and a side of fries.

Have you ever tried to eat ribs with a fork and knife? Good luck. Ribs are another food that should be added to the unexpectedly sexy category. Anything that must be eaten with the hands will a) draw attention to the mouth, and b) necessitate the oh-so-hot licking of precious sauce from the now, very dirty hands. And licking, sauce that is, can never be a bad thing.

This leads us to dessert. Sure you could nibble out of that box of chocolates or feed each other forkfuls of cake, by why not continue the tease by slowly working down a scoop of ice cream, on a cone. I’m pretty sure with all this sucking of crab, slurping of oysters, and licking of saucy, meaty fingers, by the time you eat your way to the melted ice cream at the bottom of the cone, the only thing perishable will be clothes as hands make their way to the only place they haven’t been, each other.

Serves/Makes: 1

• 3 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 1 large Dungeness crab, steamed, cleaned, and cracked
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 tablespoons garlic chili sauce (more if desired)
• 1/4 cup chopped cilantro