Crab Cakes

Yesterday I made crab cakes for the first time. On Mother's Day when I was leaving the restaurant my sister took my mom and wife, I overhead someone telling the waiter ``Those were the best crabcakes I've ever had.''

I've always loved crabcakes. I never made them myself though. I used to buy frozen Maryland crabcakes from Trader Joe's in Los Angeles and cook them in a little toaster oven in my kitchen-less studio apartment. Trader Joe's was always a little too hectic though.

So anyway overhearing that guy say that triggered my crabcake desire. Then summer vacation started and we wanted to celebrate so we went to a nearby restaurant and ordered.. crabcakes. They were good, but pricey. Then a few days ago we were at Costco and bought a 1 pound can of crabmeat for $15 which is a good price I think.

I started off by reading Jacques Pepin's recipe. He always surprises me with his subtlety and .. artistry. There's really no other word for it. So I made something like this:

1 pound crab meat, store mayonnaise, 3 ounces of white bread, black pepper, a little red pepper, olive oil. Some thyme, dill if you have it. Mix it up, pat into cakes and shallow fry. They are pretty loose.

Pepin recommends a garnish which is lovely: 1 avocado, 1 tomato, olive oil, red wine/balsamic vinegar, black pepper. Chop, mix and serve the cakes on top.

From doing this I learned something. The crab cakes I made were simpler than any I've had before. Not as many spices and flavorings. Not as much bread. What I learned was that Pepin, being a master chef, was just trying to highlight the crab, adding just a few touches here and there. Whereas when you buy crabcakes at a restaurant, they're often trying to stretch the crabmeat.

My crabcakes were better because they had way more crab in them! Even compared with expensive restaurants and Trader Joes.

The only flaw with my crabcakes was that they didn't really hold together that well. They were a bit like a crab hash. Which means add egg. The other thing to do is to make your own Mayonnaise. Next time.

You can buy a can of crab meat or steam a live crab and pick it out yourself --- or you can go crabbing like my friend took me once, but if you get wild crab it's very good just by itself, steamed or boiled.

Mayonnaise

Mayonnaise is easy, you take an electric mixer, beat egg yolks, then slowly dribble in olive oil until it's mayonnaise.

Tartar Sauce

Tartar sauce is mayonnaise, finely chopped pickles (you can use a food processor or grater,) chopped onions, lemon juice, and salt and pepper.

Crab Cakes from Jamee Ruth (whom I've never heard of)

1 pound of crab meat, chopped onion, 1/4 cup mayonnaise chopped cilantro, 3 tablespoons breadcrumbs, 1.5 teaspoons Old Bay seasoning, chopped jalapeno pepper, salt, white pepper, 1 egg, 5 tablespoons olive oil, 1/4 cup all-purpose, tartar sauce. Also a baking sheet and wax paper.

Pick any shell from 1 pound of lump crab meat. Gently blend the crabmeat, onion, mayonnaise, cilantro, some of the breadcrumbs, 2 tablespoons breadcrumbs, the Old Bay, jalapeno, salt and pepper, but don't overmix. Stir in the beaten egg. Add breadcrumbs until the mixture holds together as cakes. Make 4-8 cakes on wax paper, saran wrap and chill for 30 minutes to 24 hours.

Mix the remaining tablespoon of breadcrumbs and the 1/4 cup of all-purpose. Heat oil in a frying pan. Coat each cake with the flour mix and put into the frying pan for 3 minutes each side.

Osso Buco Semplice

This is a nice dish, and not hard to prepare --- but you have to leave time, about 2.5 hours start-to-finish. I cooked it out of Hazan several times, but not often since the Osso Buco veal cut is pricey when it's even available. It's been mostly for special occasions. But today we went to the grocery, Whole Foods, and they had Osso Buco for $13/pound. Not bad. Still pricey, not as pricey as usual. And I thought, when am I going to make this anyway if not now? So I bought it. I thought I'd freeze it and use it one day for a special dinner...

When we got back I looked through Hazan and I thought, ah, well it's a little involved. Then I looked at Elizabeth David, and I thought, as usual, ah, the essential recipe. Elizabeth David understood that having the essence of the recipe meant you could then be creative with it. So I suppose Hazan's recipe might taste better, more complex, than David's, but it also doesn't show you the core of the recipe. Once you know the core, you can do what you like with it. The core of Osso Buco is an excellent dish, a marvel of simplicity actually. And Hazan isn't hard either, once you see what you're doing.

After reading David's recipe through carefully (as I do now and didn't do as a beginner,) I knew I could cook it tonight, even though it was getting late. Which would mean I didn't have to freeze and then thaw the osso buco, which makes it better. Freezing and thawing meat well makes a big difference, I'm beginning to think, in your final dishes. For example, we eat Korean bar-be-cue, and we buy American Kobe beef and freeze it. It's always been a problem thawing that, since if you don't thaw it well then the thin slices don't come apart nicely. So I started putting it down from the freezer into the fridge the night before, and now it's perfectly thawed, and I'm sure it tastes better than when I used to have to quick-thaw it in a Ziploc in warm water --- if nothing else it's more reliably thawed all the way through.

But when you have a nice piece of meat, then it's best not to freeze it at all. So here's what I cooked, based on David's recipe:

Osso Buco

2 ossi buchi cuts, good amount of butter, 2 peeled tomatoes, 1/2 cup wine. Use a pan that will fit the ossi buchi without crowding. Brown the ossi buchi on all sides in the butter. Toss in the wine, let it bubble for 10 minutes. Meanwhile chop the tomatoes. After 10 minutes, toss them in along with 1/4 cup of water. Cover. Simmer for 2 hours.

Great dishes don't get simpler than that. Osso buco is always served with risotto Milanese (do the Italians know how to live?) and gremolata. I didn't have a lemon to grate the peel of, and I didn't have Italian parsley, so I made up Jackson-o-lata, which was pretty good. I took 6 basil leaves from my plant (in the photo!), tore them, mixed them with some lime juice and a chopped clove of garlic. That goes on top of the ossi buchi and gives them a little extra flair.

Pasta alla Mafia

As I said in my last post, I've been cooking from Anna Del Conte's Portrait of Pasta, a nice book. I borrowed it years ago from the library, made the Horace pasta and another one, both were excellent, then returned the book and didn't make the Horace pasta for a while. I didn't know I copied the recipe into a file on my computer. So recently I checked and found the file. I like chickpeas, and leeks are nice because they keep for a while in the fridge. Then just a few days ago I saw a copy online for $1.25 shipped so I bought it.

The recipe I made last night is in del Conte's ``modern'' recipes section. She calls it Pasta alla Mafia because of its Sicilian origin but doesn't explain the title beyond that. I've always had a fascination with the Mafia, with all gangsters. Three of my favorite movies are John Woo's ``A Better Tomorrow'' trilogy.



(3:03 is a classic shot. But looks like you can watch the whole thing on Youtube now. Which I might do. A Better Tomorrow has scenes in Hong Kong restaurants, it makes me want to make Chinese food again. But I'm prevented. Maybe I should go through that list of recipes that don't use many Chinese ingredients from Dunlop a little more tonight.)

So back to Pasta alla Mafia. I visited Sicily once, I kept thinking whether to go to Corleone or not, in the end we didn't. Not that anyone would mistake us for Mafiosi. But many parts of Sicily were beautiful. I remember walking around in Palermo behind our hotel, which near the Quattro Canti, trying to reach the harbor to get on a hydrofoil to some island, the buildings were old, run-down, but full of character. A little like Napoli --- the pizza in Napoli was monumental.

For this Sicilian recipe you need anchovies. Anchovies have been defamed in the United States. This is probably due to incompetence. Anchovies are probably awful if you don't know what to do with them; I know what to do with them, and because I learned from Hazan, I've never tasted a bad dish with anchovies in it --- in fact I've tasted few bad dishes at all. But I remember when I was a kid and would've parroted the idea that anchovies are awful to anyone who asked me. Only the UK eats worse than us here in the US --- the Italians and French know what to do with anchovies. But ignorance is hard to overcome. If you don't want to use anchovies in this recipe, leave them out. Put in canned tuna instead if that makes you feel better. If you want to learn to use this fine ingredient, then my advice is to get a glass jar of imported Italian anchovy fillets in olive oil. I keep mine in the fridge but I doubt it's necessary.

Pasta alla Mafia

You need anchovies, pitted olives, chilies, citrus rind/zest, spaghetti, garlic, olio. You take the citrus rind and zest and put them in a saucepan with the olio and let it mingle. Bring the pasta water to a boil. Chop the chilies, garlic and olives. Add the chilies and garlic to the oil. Throw the pasta into the water, take out the citrus rind and heat the pan. When the oil is hot, add the anchovies, and mash them up with a wooden spoon until they're just a paste. Add the olives. When the pasta done, toss everything together.

Mangiare.

The Siren Song of Ova

Eggs are one of the best items to have if you like fast, cheap cooking, and want excellent food. Eggs are the simplest excellent dish. You can make eggs just as well as some fancy Lyonnais chef can, here's the recipe:

Heat your iron pan. Put in 1-2 tablespoons of butter. Crack 2-3 eggs in a small bowl and mix, but not thoroughly. Wait until the butter just smokes and then dump the eggs in. It will sizzle, the clear albumen will turn white. Shake the pan back and forth over the heat as the eggs cook, this gives the eggs a little bit of fluff. Then slide out your omelette onto a plate, salt and pepper. Done. You could pay $300 for the same omelette.

There's all kinds of yakking in cookbooks about the perfect omelette and whatnot. There's nothing to it. The perfection of the omelette is that it's simple. Anyone can do it, easily. That's the perfection. It's not that someone who went to Le Cordon Bleu and then staged with some supercool celebrity chef like Susur Lee can make it any better. It's already perfect.

You crack the eggs into a small bowl, mix them up, dump them into the just smoking butter, shake the pan as it cooks. That's all.

There's also boiling the eggs. Put the eggs into room temperature water in a pot. Turn on the heat. Wait for it to boil. Keep the boiling very gentle, so the eggs don't break. Wait about 10 minutes (you'll have to do this by trial-and-error to find what consistency you like.) Dump out the water and fill the pot with cold water. Take out the eggs after a minute or so and peel the eggshells and the skin. Eat with salt and pepper. Perfection.

One silly thing I remember about boiled eggs --- I once went to Turkey for sightseeing. I wanted to see the remains of the Eastern Roman Empire --- being a classical history buff. So we were in Istanbul and we were served breakfast every morning at the small hotel we stayed at. And every morning it was hard to peel the skin off the eggs. We marveled that the Turks didn't know that you should chill the eggs right after boiling them to make it easier to take the skin off. The older lady who prepared the breakfast didn't speak English, and we didn't raise the point with anyone. So then we came back and we met a lady who raised chickens, and also my cello teacher raised chickens, and they'd give us their fresh eggs from time to time. When we boiled them and chilled them, the skins were hard to peel.... Turns out that the freshest, best, eggs, are hard to peel even if you chill them right after boiling. And so the Turkish breakfast lady wasn't the ignoramus, we were.

But anyway what's the siren song about? Eggs are attractive, a perfect dish, so simple, so easy, so fast, so flawless.... But there is a flaw! Eggs are pure protein, and they don't reach their highest until they are paired with a starch! How many times there were eggs in the fridge, and butter, and perfection awaited, but no, there was no bread! (Rubbing some garlic on toasted, sliced, French or Italian bread that has been drizzled in olive oil is the way to go. Bruschetta.) So now I keep potatoes on hand, but potatoes take a while to cook. And so the siren song of the eggs, ever beckoning, luring, leering.

Supersonic Thai Curry with Jasmine Rice

OK so the cookies are a bit much, I agree. And this is about fast, cheap cooking that is excellent. Well here's a fast, cheap dish that dances in the mouth (not saltimbocca, though)!

I'd always liked Thai curry and Thai food in general. I took a class once at Pasadena City College with Yupa Holzner, and actually made Pad Thai (I haven't really made it consistently since, it seems to me to involve a certain amount of preparation.) She didn't teach me how to make curry either. From Bhumichitra's book, I learned to make a vegetarian curry, and then I simplified it until I've got the cheapest, easiest, and fastest yellow Thai curry. Its a pretty good book but its a little long on ingredients.




If you're in the San Fernando Valley, then most Sundays the Thai Wat of Los Angeles has food stalls, made by members of the Wat. There's some of the best Thai food there, we used to go from West L.A.

So to eat curry, you will need to prepare Thai jasmine rice ahead of time. I have invested in a nice rice cooker, since I eat Asian food constantly. It's a great time saver, especially the programmable timer, but I used to cook rice in a pot for a long time. These recipes are for 1 person. All regular white rices cook according to the same recipe.

Rice in a Pot

Take 1 cup rice into the pot. Pour in water, stir and drain 1-2 times to wash the rice, finally drain it thoroughly. Then add 2 cups water, a pinch of salt, and if you like, some oil. Cover and boil. When it just starts to boil, lower the heat to a very slow simmer. Done in about 20-40 minutes. Check the pot as little as possible --- open it quickly, tilt the pot, and use a spoon to peek at the bottom of the pot, if there's water, put it back, if not, the rice is done.

Supersonic Yellow Thai Curry

You need: a pack of yellow Thai curry, 1-2 cloves garlic, 1-2 potatoes, 2-3 green onions, a can of Thai coconut milk, soy sauce, salt, oil (peanut, canola or olive are best,) sugar

Chop the garlic and fry in oil (about 1 tablespoon) on medium heat. Chop the potatoes into 1/2 inch cubes or smaller. When the garlic is a little transparent and golden, add a tablespoon or so of the curry and stir-fry for 30 seconds --- it may spatter so be careful! Now pour in 1/3 can of coconut milk and let it cook for about 1 minute, then sweep the potatoes in and cook for 5-7 minutes. Meanwhile chop the green onions --- chop the white finely and the green into slanted slices about 1" long or so. Add the green onions to the curry in 5-7 minutes, then sugar, salt and soy sauce to taste. Eat with the rice.