The first thing I do after I move is to look for the seafood market. It's especially interesting to wander around the stalls on a rainy day. While crabs cower lazily in water tanks, fish and shrimp are anxious, with some trying to jump out. Despite the fishy smell, it's still a great pleasure to take a stroll through the market either alone or together with a friend. Seafood in all its grotesque shapes can be found, and if you live in a forest of steel and cement all day long, a walk in the seafood market leads you back into nature in a blink of an eye.

Marine crabs and mantis shrimps are my favorites. Near to any seafood market, one can easily find stores that can process on the spot the seafood you just bought. But nothing beats taking fresh creatures all the way home, drowning them in wine, placing them in a steaming pot or stir-frying them with prepared spices, and then sitting down and enjoying the freshness.

As Sichuan dishes, characterized by the spicy cooking of Southwest China, spread eastward and become popular across the country, spicy crabs have become a classic dish in many seafood restaurants. But cooking spicy crabs at home brings much more pleasure.

For instance, by spending 500 yuan ($80), three to four people can have a nice meal of spicy crab pot at a nice restaurant, with both crabs and vegetable cooked together. But for the same cost, I can get 10 huge sea crabs at a seafood market, and together with some other dishes, I can serve at least five friends at home.

Tissues are quickly consumed during a spicy crab dinner, as people keep cleaning their fingers spotted by spicy sauces. Sometimes in order to avoid this, I cook steamed crabs, and make separately my unique spicy sauces, to which several different relishes are added. Some of my friends do not need the sauces at all;  the freshness of the crab flesh is enough for them. The same logic of "adding nothing" also applies to mantis shrimps.

I increasingly find that a seafood dinner is the best thing to serve friends at home. It brings endless topics: how to differentiate female crabs from male ones, and what are the small techniques to avoid being hurt by shrimps. And because eating seafood is usually a very slow process, we always have enough time to exchange gossip.

This article was published on the Global Times Metropolitan section Two Cents page, a space for reader submissions, including opinion, humor and satire. The ideas expressed are those of the author alone, and do not represent the position of the Global Times.