Recipes for the restive

I got nothing except a recipe from a friend of mine, Gus. I inspired him with my talk of good ol' Southern food on Friday and he went home this weekend and whipped up some tasty goodness. I got his in my email this morning. Enjoy.

Gus’ Super-Duper Crab Cakes with Crawfish Tails Instead of Crab

Degredients

1 lb crab meat, but instead of crab meat use crawfish tails

1 rib of celery (Wait, is a rib the whole thing or just one piece you pull off the clump? Just use

 one piece.), cut into itty-bitty pieces about this big

1 carrot, peeled and cut into itty-bitty pieces about this big

½ of a small onion, peeled and cut into itty-bitty pieces about this big

1 clove of garlic, minced

1 cup of toasted breadcrumbs (optional)

3 large eggs

½ tsp or so of lime zest (optional) (Ha! Yeah, no, this isn’t optional.)

To taste:  Salt, pepper, Old Bay seasoning, Worcestercestershire sauce

Destructions

Roughly chop the crab crawfish tails and set aside in a small bowl. Sauté celery, carrots, onion and garlic in some olive oil for a minute or two until soft.  Add to the shrimp crawfish. (Unless your cat ate it all out of the bowl when you weren’t paying attention; if so, go back to Wally World, buy some more, and start over again. Not that this happened to me or anything.)

Separate the eggs (by removing the yolks from the whites, not by placing the eggs in different locations around your house).  Stir the yolks in with the salmon crawfish mixture.  Beat the egg whites to soft peaks and then fold into the moose crawfish. [Editor’s note:  I’m not sure what the point of this step was.  As soon as you start folding, the egg whites begin to deflate.  When I make this recipe again I may omit this step and just stir the whole eggs into the crawfish mixture.  Use your best judgment.]  Season with salt, pepper, Worcestercestershire, lime zest and Old Bay. 

Decide whether you want to add breadcrumbs.  Without the breadcrumbs, the cakes taste great but they don’t hold together well during frying.  With the breadcrumbs, the cakes hold together better but they taste like, you know, they have breadcrumbs in them.  You have the power – you decide.

Form the whale crawfish cakes into patties and refrigerate for about half an hour to firm them up.  Heat some more olive oil in a pan and fry the patties until golden brown on both sides.  Sprinkle with lime juice, if desired.  These would probably also taste good with Hollandaise sauce except 1) I don’t know what Hollandaise sauce is, and 2) I didn’t have any.