Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes

This Latin proverb came into our minds when we had to deal with a gift brought to us by one of our Taiwanese colleagues: CRABS!!! A real Danaans' gift...

We got 14 of these crabs plus a fish and two large squids!

Our colleague's father-in-law obviously is a passionate fisher and gave his daughter and son-in-law so many seafood that our colleague generously distributed them among his colleagues. Or maybe he just knew, what would follow having a lots of crabs to prepare...

Having boiled the crabs for a short while in a fish soup with onions, bay leaves and thyme, we had the get the meat out of the shell. Coming from a land-locked country with no what-so-ever experience in cooking seafood, we were quite lost at this point...
Thank God that there is internet - so I could find a "manual" how to crack the carapace and extract the meat. Well, it was more a picking and rasping and scraping and breaking than a clean extracting!
After almost two hours of the both of us working hard on the little buggers, we found the following result:
A huge bowl of debris and a tiny bowl of meat... what a misfit!


Anyway, thanks to internet again, I found a recipe for cooking these delicious bastards. We made crab cakes (here is the link to the recipe). They turned out really well and all yummy!

So there is our "conclusio, conclusio!":
The crabs are incredibly delicious, but its really hard work until you can enjoy them!

Nevertheless, I still have these two big squids and the fish in my freezer... Can anyone of you recommend a recipe, thus that the cephalopods do not turn into chewy rubber bands?