Capellini with crab, jalapeño and mint

If you've been watching Top Chef Masters, you've seen this dish. Chef Jonathan Waxman made it a couple weeks back for one of the challenges. He said it was a big hit at his restaurant and the (amateur) judges seemed to like it quite a bit, but it didn't make sense to me. I've got enough experience at this that usually I can see how ingredients fit together; these, not so much.

I've got all four of those ingredients in the house right now. It's an odd happenstance really as jalapeños are the only one I consider a staple. I only buy those other three when I've got some particular purpose in mind and the leftovers don't last indefinitely.

I'm using canned crab, not the king crab leg Waxman calls for, but otherwise I'm following the recipe I found on the Top Chef Masters website as best I can. Unfortunately, it's missing some important details, like temperatures, cooking times. Adding the crab. I made guesses for the missing bits, but it's a simple enough recipe that I don't think I can go too far wrong.

As an aside here, does it bother the rest of you as much as it bothers me to see broken recipes on profession websites? It's surprisingly common to find recipes with unused ingredients, vague instructions or chunks missing out of the middle. I expect that from recipe sites that are made up of user-submitted content, but mass media companies really ought to do better. It's not that hard. Are there no copy editors or proof readers to look at these things? Don't the chefs with their names attached ever check?

Anyway, here's my version.

Ingredients:
2 Tablespoons butter
1/2 jalapeño, finely diced
zest from 1/4 of a lemon
zest from 1/4 of a lime
1 small clove garlic, minced
2 Tablespoons mint leaves chiffinade
1/2 cup crab meat
1/2 pound angel hair pasta
juice from 1/2 of a lemon

0. Put a large pot of water on high heat. When water reaches a boil move on to step one.

1. Melt butter in a medium pan over medium heat. When it's done sizzling add jalapeño, zest, garlic and mint. Turn heat down to low and sweat the pepper and garlic for several minutes. Add crab and cook for a minute more.

2. Add pasta and a few pinches of salt to the boiling water. Cook to al dente. (capellini takes only a few minutes) When just barely done remove from water with tongs and add to the pan without draining. Mix well. Add lemon juice and a bit more water to loosen the sauce if necessary. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Serve garnished with a bit more mint.
And here it is. The mint and citrus have blended together mojitoly, but the crab is still distinct and I'm getting different ratios of the two flavors (plus a touch of heat) in each bite. he flavor is best, I think, when crab is in the forefront, but I only get that when I get an actual forkful of crab. Maybe that's because I'm using relatively cheap canned crab that doesn't have the intense flavor of the king crab legs Waxman uses. Also, king crab leg meat would be in chunks not tiny flakes. That probably makes a significant difference.

The flavor combination is interesting and unusual, but not a synergistic knock out like some recipes I've tried. The problem is that it's all right at the front of each bite with no follow-through. There's some element missing to round out the back end. I think chunks of king crab would help here, but lacking that it needs something else. Maybe just a little wine or shrimp stock would do it, but I'm not going to put everything back in the pan to find out.

I don't suppose any of you have been to his restaurant, Barbuto, and tried the proper version?

CSA week one - Thai corn, coconut and crab soup

This isn't a real Thai recipe. There's a real Thai corn and crab soup, Kaeng Poo Kab Kao Phod, but the recipes I found for it call for a can of creamed corn. I went a different way.

First up, I needed a base for the soup and this seemed a good time to make a batch of shrimp stock. Every time I cook shrimp, I keep the shells and I had accumulated a quart bag full in the freezer. I knew it was going to make more than what I needed today so I kept the seasonings simple:
1 quart shrimp shells
2 corn cobs
1 half onion, cut in two
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon whole peppercorns

All that went into a large pot with water to cover--around six cups--and simmered for twenty minutes. Then I strained it, set two cups aside to freeze, and started into the dish proper.

To start building the Thai flavors, I added:
2 lemongrass stalks, trimmed and crushed
1 hot pepper, split
2 cloves garlic
1 piece dried galangal (Galangal is a relative of ginger with a less sharp, more floral flavor)
4 ears of corn kernels

and simmered for a half hour.

Afterwards, I fished out the lemongrass, galangal and a cup of the corn, added:
1 cup coconut milk
1 Tablespoon fish sauce

and blended in batches until the soup was fairly smooth.

Then I returned the reserved corn and added:
6 ounces of picked crab (Lump crab would have been better. Crab claws would have been better still. Dropping in a whole fresh crab might have been interesting.)
and, if I had thought of it, this would have been a good time to add some thinly sliced kaffir lime leaves. But I didn't remember until much later so I only added them to the leftovers.

and simmered for 5 minutes to blend the flavors.

Finally, I garnished with copious cilantro and scallion, a squirt of sriracha and a squeeze of lime. And, after tasting, a bit more fish sauce and, to compensate for few-day-old corn, a bit of sugar.


I think you can see that the texture ended up kind of sludgy. The fresh corn was kind of tough and didn't blend so well instead of the creamy result you'd get from blending canned or frozen corn. You're going to get sludge from the picked crab anyway so that's OK.

The corn flavor, once I had tweaked it with a little sugar, was strong through and harmonized nicely with the crab. The lemongrass and galangal flavors, which were prominent before blending were kind of lost and the coconut was pretty mild so it was up to the herbs and the funkiness of the fish sauce and kaffir lime leaves to add complexity to the soup and make it definitely Thai. A slight shift and this could have easily ended up Chinese or Southwestern or a bisque and been just as good. Lots of room for variation to preferences here.

CSA week two - Braised Chinese lettuce with dried shrimp

This is a recipe from the Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook that I've mentioned several times before. Like most of those thousand recipes, it's pretty simple but open to elaboration. And as usual for me, my elaboration got a bit out of control. Still, things turned out fine. Or should I have left some suspense?

The recipe calls for a full pound of Chinese lettuce but my half share didn't include nearly that much. When I added my leftover bok choy I got about half a pound so the recipe was workable.

Ingredients:
4-5 dried shrimp
2 dried black mushrooms (Both my shrimp and mushrooms were pretty small so I doubled these numbers back up to the original 8-10 and 4. You can judge from the pictures of the end result whether I had too much.)
1/4 cup ham (I used some leftover country ham I had lying around)
1/2 pound Chinese lettuce and/or bok choy
1/4 cup sliced bamboo shoots
1 Tablespoon oil
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup mushroom soaking liquid
1/4 cup picked crab (It doesn't store well so I'm adding it to everything this week until I run out.)
1 Tablespoon soy sauce
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons cornstarch
sesame oil

0. Separately soak shrimp and mushrooms in hot water. Reserve mushroom soaking liquid. The shrimp soaking liquid is kind of nasty. Toss that.

1. Coarsely chop lettuce. Fill a large pot with water, bring to a boil and add lettuce. Blanch lettuce for 1 to 2 minutes then drain.

2. Dump out water and reheat pot over medium high heat until it's dry. Add oil. Heat until it's shimmery. Add shrimp and ham and stir fry 2 minutes. Add lettuce, stir fry to coat with oil then sprinkle with salt. Add bamboo shoots and stir fry one minute more.

3. Add mushroom liquid. Bring to boil, turn heat down to low, cover and simmer 10 minutes.

4. Add mushrooms, soy sauce, sugar and crab. Turn the heat up a little compensate for heat lost while you were doing that, re-cover, and simmer 10 minutes more.

5. Add cornstarch (mixed into a Tablespoon of cold water). Stir and heat until the sauce thickens up a little.

6. Serve topped with a drizzle of sesame oil or chili oil might be nice too.


Surprisingly, the lettuce hasn't fallen apart after all that cooking. It's soft to the bite, certain, but not mush, and the leaves trap the sauce quite nicely. There's some textural interest from the mushrooms, ham and bamboo shoots so soft lettuce is fine. The sauce has picked up a lot of flavor mainly from the shrimp and soy sauce, but you can taste the lettuce in it too which I didn't expect. I think I overdid the salt a little since it came in from so many sources, but otherwise I'm happy with the results. Next time I'll serve it over noodles which, texturally, would be a better match than rice. As for the lettuce, I think the likes of Romaine would stand up to braising well. I'm not sure how much the different flavor would change the dish though. I'll have to try it and see.

CSA week two - Callaloo

First up this week is callaloo. Looking around at recipes on-line I get the impression that callaloo is a very vague term that covers any soup or stew that has braised callaloo as it's main ingredient. I chose a Trinidadian variation I found on Recipezaar because it included Maggi seasoning cubes and golden ray cooking margarine. I'm not going to use either, but the fact that it kept those traditional Caribbean ingredients is a good sign. Also, it includes a bit of butternut squash substituting for west Indian pumpkin which seemed a nice bit of happenstance.

The first problem was adjusting the recipe for the amount of callaloo I've got. I'm not sure how to interpret the recipe's call for 15-20 dasheen leaves. (As best as I can tell, different types of greens are used in making callaloo on different islands around the Caribbean and whatever the locals use, they call callaloo. On Trinidad, they use dasheen which I'm hoping is what I've got.) I can't take that literally both because the leaves vary a great deal in size and because, even using the largest leaves, 15-20 won't make the 6 to 8 servings this recipe's supposed to make. After picking off all of the leaves I measured them out and I seem to have around 3 cups worth. Looking around at other recipes that measure out the leaves by volume and assuming standard serving sizes I need to cut down this recipe by three quarters. That gives me:

* 1/2 tablespoons vegetable oil
* 1/4 medium onion
* 1 garlic cloves, minced
* 1/2 tablespoons chopped celery [which I skipped because I'm not buying a whole head of celery for that tiny amount]
* 1/16 cup fresh thyme [none handy so I used dried]
* 1/8 cup chopped chives
* 4 okra, sliced [which I skipped because stewed okra is icky]
* 1/8 cup chopped west Indian pumpkin (substitute butternut squash)
* 1 CSA half-share dasheen, washed and coarsely chopped
* 1/4 cup coconut milk
* 1/4 Maggi seasoning, cube plus [this is just bullion so I used stock]
* 1 cups water or chicken stock
* 1/2 live blue crab, cleaned and washed in lime juice (or 5-6 pieces salted beef or salted pigtail) [I didn't like the looks of the crabs I saw at the market so I bought a jar of pre-picked crab. Also, in the recipes I saw it looked like any smoked pork product would do. I cut up some smoked ham and used that too.]
* 1/4 whole scotch bonnet pepper (Congo pepper) [Caribbean cuisine uses the hottest possible pepper and prepares it in the wimpiest possible way. I presume that's because that's the only peppers they have to use. I split the difference by using half of a more reasonable Serrano pepper]
* 1/2 tablespoons golden ray cooking margarine [or butter]
* 1/4 teaspoon salt (if using Maggi cube taste first before adding salt or the soup will be too salty.)

1. Put salted pork [or beef or cod if you're using anything of the sort] pieces in a pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil. Drain off this water. Repeat this process to draw off the excess salt from the salted meat.

2. Heat the oil in a large pot and add the onion, garlic, celery and fresh herbs [and ham]. Sauté until fragrant, about 2 minutes. Add okras, pumpkin and dasheen leaves and sauté for another minute or so. Add the coconut milk and stock or water, crab and hot pepper.

3. Keep an eye on that hot pepper use one that is not bruised. You DO NOT want that pepper to burst while cooking. The heat from the burst pepper will overpower the other flavours. [So why ask for trouble if you don't need to?]



4. Bring to a boil and reduce heat to a simmer. Cook uncovered for about 35 minutes.



5. Taste and add salt if needed.
6. Remove hot pepper and crab or meat, [Whoops! I should have left my chunks of ham large. It took me some time to pick all the little ham pieces out during this step.] and swizzle the callaloo, or put in a blender or you can use an immersion type blender, and beat until smooth. Return the crab or meat pieces to the soup. Add the cooking margarine or butter. Simmer for 5 more minutes. Stir well. [I used the blender]
7. Serve hot as a soup on it's own or as a side dish. [or over rice]

And the results are...OK. The texture is a creamy sauce about the same as palak paneer; Okra definitely would not have been a help. The flavor is rather mild, easily diluted by the rice or overwhelmed by the Pickapeppa hot sauce I used so I didn't want to thin it out into a proper soup even if I did screw it up to get it this thick (which I don't think I did). The ham doesn't stand out and there's a hint of the crab but the flavor is mostly just the callaloo. The differences from spinach are subtle. There's a slight pungency and a chard-like bitter aftertaste that's interesting, but not something I'd aim at deliberately. A pinch of sugar mixed in helps with that and a pinch of salt brightens the flavors up. No real heat despite the fact that I chopped up the pepper and put it back in the pot. Overall, it's not bad, but it's not great either. Next time I think I'll try a different variation--something with tomatoes maybe.

CSA week ten - stone crab slaw

At the Slow Food stone crab picnic two weeks ago two things occurred to me. First, it was a bit of a shame to waste that crab juice that got all over everything as it was actually rather tasty and second, I wished I had some vegetables to dip in the sauce that the Judy the Stone Crab Lady made for the crabs as it was pretty good on its own. So when I returned to the Coral Gables farmer's market this week and bought some crabs I figured there was room to try something there.

So I cracked my crab carefully over a bowl to collect the run off. I ended up with maybe a quarter cup from a pound of crab. I also set aside the meat from a couple claws for incorporating with the dish. I neglected to document this but click on this photo from two weeks ago and you'll see the juice all over the inside of that bag.

For the vegetables I looked at what I had left from CSA week ten. Most of cabbage, half of the red pepper and still plenty of scallions. There are different philosophies on preparing cabbage for use in slaw. I think the folks from Whisk who made slaw for the picnic just chopped it up and tossed it in, but others soak it or salt it first. Personally, I'm in the salting camp. Like the deep frying of the green beans in the stir fry I posted about a few days ago, it pulls some of the water out of the vegetables so when you introduce a tastier source of moisture it'll stick. I sliced up 3/4 lb. of cabbage (about half the head from my share. Yours may vary.), tossed it with a tablespoon of kosher salt and let it drain in a colander for a couple hours and then rinsed and salad-spun it. This leaves the cabbage pre-seasoned and crisp, but not stiff like fresh cabbage can be. It's a congenial texture for mixing with a dressing and lifting on a fork which is a good secondary benefit.

In addition I chopped up a couple scallions and a quarter of the red pepper. It's possible I should have taken pictures of all this, but it didn't occur to me at the time. It's unlikely to be so tricky that anyone needs visual aids, anyway. [Addendum: the next day I added a handful of halved grape tomatoes and a quarter cup of chopped sweet onion along with all the crab I had left and, apparently, about half a pound of tiny bits of crab-shell. Other than the shell, all good additions.]

Normally for a cole slaw dressing, at least of one sort, you'd mix mayonnaise with some vinegar, salt, pepper and some flavoring. The Crab Lady's dipping sauce follows the same recipe with the flavoring in this case being horseradish. It's, luckily, a bit too thick so when I thinned it out with the crab juice the texture was just right.

The end result has a nice mix of textures with the soft pieces of crab and the chewiness of the cabbage. The flavor benefits from creamy mildly bitter sauce and the sweetness of the crab balancing the saltiness of the cabbage.

It's very much a side dish, though so I have to decide what to serve it with tomorrow (cole slaw improves in the refrigerator overnight). It might work well with beer battered fish.

Slow food, stone crabs and farmers markets

As I mentioned in passing in my last post, I spent some time at the Coral Gables farmers market after picking up my CSA share yesterday. I picked up a few interesting items and attended a Slow Food stone crab picnic.

Personally, I'd call the Coral Gables farmers market and pretty good street fair, but with only a couple of produce stalls amongst the caterers, bakers and candlestick makers it's not quite a farmers market to my mind. And can anyone explain the appeal of a guacamole stall? Even if guacamole was hard to make, who wants some out of a giant tub that's been sitting out for the last four hours?

I had expected to make some rapid recipe decisions on my CSA share but this week's selection didn't require it. The only produce I picked up was a pint of strawberries which I'll probably end up eating straight instead of making the ice cream topping I meant them for. I also got a couple of rather impressive foccacia: one artichoke and one sun dried tomato. They definitely beat the wares of the foccacia vendor at the Union Square farmers market in Manhattan. I picked up a little bit of tea as well; I'm generally happy with Theine, but Kyra doesn't stock as good a variety of fruit green tea blends or candy-enhanced black teas as I'd like. I don't like the open bowls the tea and spice vendor stores his wares in, but I got there early so I don't think the tea lost too much zip. I picked up a caramel black tea and a blend called Sunny Sencha with a tropical fruit and flowers mixed in.

At Karen's Kreations I picked up Garlic & Raspberry Jelly and Cranberry & Chipotle Jelly. I've had garlic and hot pepper jellies before and while they're nice novelties it's hard to find real uses for them and most of the bottle ends up going to waste. The fruit additions Karen used makes them more than ingredients; they can actually be used as jelly. I have to carefully consider the next loaf of bread I bake to make the best match, though.

And, as I was running out, I got a jar of honey. I chose gallberry honey which is exceptionally light and should be good for tea. In the slightly blurry picture, you can see that the label looks quite similar to the Bee Heaven label on the honey I got in my share a few weeks back. So if Miguel Bode, who packed the gallberry honey, isn't associated with Bee Heaven, you guys ought to have a word with him.

After my shopping it was off to the picnic. There was a demonstration of a stone crab and avocado recipe by Chef Roberto Ferrer, but just as I sat down for it the head of Slow Food Miami, Donna Reno, shanghaied me into helping set up. (I wasn't surprised that she recognized me given my distinctive hat and the knack the heads of these sorts of groups tend to have for that sort of thing, but she remembered my name and knew where I worked which I knew I had never mentioned to her. It seems she noted my lack of sociability back at the Slow Food wine tasting in October, followed up by talking to the couple I had sat next to at the Ideas dinner and now has taken a particular interest in introducing me around and making sure I mingle. Is it so wrong that I'd prefer to eat my lunch in peace while reading a book?) Check the Slow Food Miami webpage for more pics likely including one of me mingling.

The picnic featured stone crabs supplied by Judy the Stone Crab Lady and sides from Chef Brendan Connor (left) and Kristin Connor who run a catering company called Whisk Gourmet. It was pretty good on the whole.

This was my first experience with stone crabs. Any local folks reading are probably familiar with the Miami tradition of gathering in public places to brutalize crustaceans with blunt instruments. I generally prefer to dismantle crabs in a more precise and considered manner, but just whacking away with a hammer makes some sense when it's just claws. (Stone crabs are caught in traps, de-clawed, and then thrown back to grow a new one which they can do several times. All very ecologically sound if you do it the proper way Probably nobody does as the wrong way is significantly faster and cheaper, but I'll assume the best of Judy the Stone Crab Lady until I learn otherwise. She seemed nice enough, anyway.) A pound of claws gives enough meat for lunch and, since it's particularly sweet and succulent crab in unusually large chunks, is definitely worth the ten bucks.

The sides were good but nothing too outstanding: a standard coleslaw, beets, a greek salad sort of thing, potato salad with bacon and key lime pie. The best was the beets although I would have liked to have identified the creamy white substance they were coated in. Personally, I thought they all (bar the pie) could have done with a bit more salt.

From what I heard, the picnic was a new venture for Slow Food Miami although I would have thought some presence at farmers markets would be one of the first things they'd try. It may have been too successful as it was overbooked in reservations so interested passers-by couldn't drop in and see what Slow Food is all about. But at least half of the people who did reserve weren't Slow Food members so there may have been some new interest there. Maybe not though; all of the events are open and announced to the public and there's no membership discount so you don't really get a lot for that extra expenditure.

Still, a good time was had by all (bar the crabs) and that's something even if nothing else was accomplished.

CSA week seven - crab, scallion and tomato quiche

I have just discovered that every quiche I've had before now was overcooked. I suppose I should have figured that out considering how rubbery and dry they all were. But an counter-example does wonders where logic falters.

As I mentioned in the last post, quiche is one of the few applications for a whole bunch of scallions. I pieced together the recipe I used from a half dozen or so I found on-line plus a little actual thought on my part. The most valuable information I found on the web was this generalized recipe for a generic crustless quiche. I knew I wasn't about to make a crust; for one thing it's a pain in the butt. And for another, I'm skeptical of the whole idea of a crust on a quiche. They always turn out dried out on the edges and gummy on the bottom. If you really need some starch, have a slice of bread. Anyway, when I went shopping for the rest of the ingredients the only ready-made crust available was Pilsbury and while that, somewhat surprisingly, had the lard required for a tender crumb, it also had sugar as it was intended for pies and I didn't think that would work out so well. But crustless isn't a problem. I didn't have the deep dish 9" pie pan the recipe called for so I used my paella pan. It's eight inches at the bottom and ten at the top, so close enough.

The recipe calls for around a cup and a half of solid ingredients. I had 6 oz. of crab meat (The real stuff, but not the good stuff. There are too many other ingredients to make the really good stuff necessary. I do wish I could have used local crab instead of a can imported from Thailand, though.), three small tomatoes, peeled, seeded and chopped (I didn't use the grape tomatoes we got in this week's share. I happened to purchase a box of tomatoes and a bunch of scallions not long before the share arrived so I've got more than plenty of both. Given the choice I passed on trying to peel grape tomatoes and used the slightly larger tomatoes I had picked up at the market.) and a bunch of scallions wilted in a fair bit of butter. That added up to a bit more than 1 1/2 cups but the crab didn't pack very tightly so I figured I was good.

I added to that 1/2 cup or so of Gruyere cheese, which is a nice match with crab, a good bit of pepper, a judicious application of salt and a couple teaspoons of Parisien Bonnes Herbes, an herb mix from Spice House that contains tarragon, chervil, basil, dill, chives and white pepper. It has a sweet flavor that goes nicely with shellfish, onions and eggs so I was pretty confident it would work here (which it, in fact, did). With the pricey Gruyere and the crab, this may be the most expensive recipe I've come up with for the cheapest subscription ingredient. But given the lovely results, I can't really argue.

The recipe calls for 1 to 1 1/2 cups of liquid mixed with four eggs. I used a half cup of heavy cream that I had leftover and about 3/4 cups of whole milk. I suspect most quiches I've had before now have skimped on the fat to the detriment of the texture. You could use skim milk and egg substitute if you really wanted to. I'm not going to recommend it, though.

It only took 30 minutes at 375 degrees to finish cooking the quiche which is substantially less time than most recipes call for. The slightly larger pan made for a slightly shallower quiche which may have contributed to the short cooking time, but I suspect most published recipes have a cooking time bumped up by ten minutes due to salmonella concerns. Since you're only using four eggs that shouldn't really be an issue, particularly if they're organic (as I presume most CSA subscribers are buying).

Serve with a salad, crusty bread and a white wine (something fairly dry to counter the sweetness of the crab and herbs. I'm having a Louis Latour 2006 Chardonnay Bourgogne. Since I'm only willing to pay $15 for a bottle I prefer to get a low end bottle from a high end vineyard than than the top of the line from a low end vineyard. It's a philosophy that has worked well for both wine and home electronics.). I am very happy with the results; this may be the most successful of the CSA recipes I've made so far. It's buttery, sweet, light and tender. And despite all the other flavors going on, the scallions make a major contribution so it's worth calling a CSA dish.