King Crab with Jicama, Avocado, and Dried Dragonfruit

I didn’t go into Monterey Fish, looking for King crab, but as soon as I entered, Tom Worthington — co-owner and raconteur extraordinaire, whose little office serves as a water-cooler of sorts for sushi chefs, restaurant owners, wine merchants, and various other food-obsessed people who enjoy each other’s company as Tom’s workers tally up the damage — pulled off a huge leg and handed it to me to gnaw on. It was unimaginably sweet and oceany. So I bought two legs and pondered what I was going to do with them.

As it happened, I had a fresh bulb of jicama and a good avocado, a promising beginning for a crab salad of some kind. It seemed to need both some color contrast and some fruitiness. I thought about the overpriced persimmon in my fruit bowl — a miracle in itself in this fourth week of March — but dismissed it as too mild and too similar to the avocado in texture. Then I remembered the curious bag of dried dragonfruit I had recently bought at Trader Joe’s — vibrant, pomegranate-red, slightly chewy texture, with some fruity pop. Julienned, it would make an excellent little last-step sprinkling. Finally, the crab needed some kind of citrus for tang, so a Meyer lemon got squeezed and spritzed. Which salt? Since crab likes citrus so much, my mind drifted to kaffir lime, so I took a few leaves out of the freezer and whirred them up with my trusty sel gris to give it yet another notch of fragrance to go with all that texture and oceany goodness.