For Christmas 2005 I flew out to Windsor, California (about an hour outside the Bay Area) to spend the holiday with my oldest sister and her family. I hadn’t been out there in ages, and that actually may have been my first time I saw their house. But I digress.
Christmas Eve, we drove to the local wharf where my brother-in-law, Patrick, went inside and bought probably a dozen or so live crabs. He put them in the car, and off we went to prep them. I don’t know how the preparation was done, but was just thankful to be fed such a fantastic holiday meal. What I do remember though, was that that was the best Christmas meal I had ever eaten, not to mention fun to crack that little sucker open and scrape the luscious meat out. Some of the guests did not even touch their crab!!! However, this greatly worked to my advantage. A few days later, I had the best crab cakes of my life, which I have been unable to replicate through various restaurant avenues.
When I went to see her again in April, I spoke of these legendary – in my mind – crab cakes that had the largest and most rich pieces of crab you could imagine (think hamburger patty size, and about half an inch thick). The next day, I was elbow deep in fresh, albeit dead, crab. We loosely followed this recipe.
We spread news paper out on the kitchen table, grabbed a paper bag, and crab meat extraction kit (who am i kidding? They were nut crackers and little picks). We had at it like monsters, ripping off claws, limbs and cracking open the chest cavity. Eventually we got all the meat out off about four crabs.
With my hands, I mixed in the bread crumbs, onion, mayo, egg, mustard and Worcestershire sauce. After it was all good and mixed, the crab meat was broken down from handling it and mixing in all of the ingredients, and not so much in the large pieces that we (mostly Patrick, my pieces were tiny) extracted initially. I balled them up and flattened them, while at the same time heating up a skillet with butter.
Then they hit the scorching hot pan where I tried not to pat too much attention to them and work on the asparagus that we were making on the next burner over, while Patrick whipped up a salad with home-made balsamic vinaigrette.
Here they are in the pan, becoming the perfect, crisp, golden brown:
Everyone enjoyed them that ate them, even my five-year old niece who promised me she wouldn’t touch them. They did not quite hot the spot I was desiring, as I think it was too mayoey for my taste, but were definitely better than the ones that I had been getting at restaurants. However, I’m fine with this. It just means another trip is in order to perfect the crab cakes I have been longing to have.
