Confession time: I've never cooked fresh crab, or cracked one.

My sole experience of killing a live creature came one day a few summers back when we were renting a vacation home out Kahuku away and we bought a cooler full of immense and lively Hawaiian blue prawns at Romy's.

Lively? More like deadly. These guys had long, restless bodies, about a million legs, drooping red whiskers and one immensely long, bright blue arm — longer than mine! — tipped by a lethal-looking snapping claw. I was terrified .

Chef Mavro, who had come to dinner that night with his wife, Donna Jung, helped me out by cleaning them before their bath in garlic, butter and cream. While he snapped off appendages, he told a funny story about how he was showing off for a photographer once and got nipped until he bled by one of these creatures. I was picking blue shell out of the kitchen crevices for a week.

This story, not so funny in retrospect, was in my mind as I drove home with two Dungeness crabs in a damp paper sack, listening to the scrabbling of their claws.

Crab is such a great favorite of Islanders, I wanted to offer readers a how-to guide to cracking fresh crab for festive and decadent holiday recipes. It was time for me to learn.

One thing I learned was that whole steamed crabs are hard to find. Too late, I found them at Costco (but that's an on-again, off-again thing). Mostly, if you want a whole crab, you have to buy one from a seafood market with a crab tank and boil or steam it yourself — try Chinatown, Asian groceries.

My crab-boiling adventure went smoothly with the aid of a very large pot and some very long tongs (see crab-boiling instructions elsewhere in this section).

The next day, when the cooked crab had chilled, seafood expert Elmer Guzman of the Poke Stop restaurants — using what he calls his "caveman technique," no tools, just hands — gave me a crab-cracking tutorial. We started with a Dungeness crab because it's got the largest yield of readily available meat and it's not as tricky or potentially hazardous as some of the smaller, local forms of crab with their sharp claws.

Here's how to crack a steamed or boiled Dungeness crab.

1. Twist off the legs. Set aside.

2. On the underside, find the triangular "tail" or flap, hook a finger under and pull off.

3. Slip thumb into tail crevice, grasp firmly with other hand and pull top shell away from bottom.

4. Inside top shell, scrape out and retain yellowish-green "miso" or "butter" and its liquid. These are the crab's internal organs and are considered the "foie gras of the sea," salty and rich, Guzman said. Remove and discard the ridged gills. Dark brown stomach lining can be discarded, or dipped in tempura batter for a pupu.

5. Place bottom of crab with back end to you. With fingers, crack open cartilage and delicately pry out meat from back to front, first encountering the large pieces of jumbo lump, then the lump and, finally, the bits of white meat. Pick carefully through meat to find and discard all cartilage . Try not to break up meat any more than necessary. A slim knife or nut pick can be helpful.

6. With the back of a Chinese cleaver, whack the largest segment of the crab leg crosswise to crack it open. Gently pry out leg meat, keeping it whole, if possible. With cleaver, crack second joint lengthwise. Use the pointed tip of the third segment to dig the meat out of the narrow second joint.

"The claws are like the dark meat of the turkey, richer in flavor. The lump meat is like the white meat," Guzman said.