Japanese Crab Cakes with Spicy Mayo

 

This is a great recipe that makes for some scrumptious crab cakes. They're a bit finicky, though, as several steps are required to put them together. But they're not difficult to create.

More importantly, they need to be deep fried, so this recipe is *not* for everyone!

But we're not everyone so we bravely forged ahead. The Wonder Woman has lots of experience with stovetop deep frying as she has make wonderful spring rolls for lots of years (more about them in a later post).

Our deep fryer is a pot on the stove top. It's fine if you watch carefully and don't allow it to overheat and start smoking or burning. We keep the heat relatively low, too.

These crab cakes are very nice when served fresh from the fryer with some spicy mayo. The spice level is up to you, of course. Feel free to adjust the ingredients as you see fit.



Ingredients for the spicy mayo

• 120 ml mayonnaise (1/2 cup)
• 60 ml (or to taste) your favourite hot sauce such as Sriracha or Sambal Oelek or Tabasco (1/4 cup)
• 30 ml tobiko fish roe (optional) (2 Tbsp)
• 10 ml rice wine or rice vinegar (2 tsp)
• freshly grated lemon zest

Ingredients for the crab cakes

• 65 g flour (1/2 cup)
• 120 g butter (1/2 cup)
• 750 ml milk (3 cups)
• 500 g crab meat, in small chunks or diced. (1 lb)
• 1 small onion, finely minced
• salt and pepper to taste
• 125 ml rice wine (optional) (1/2 cup)
• 1 medium potato, cubed and boiled. mash it until it's no longer lumpy
• Flour for coating
• 1 egg, beaten, for coating
• Panko bread crumbs, from Japan, for coating. You can substitute regular bread crumbs but they won't have that special crunch.
• oil for deep frying

Directions for the spicy mayo

Combine all ingredients in a small blender, or stir vigorously. Refrigerate until ready to use.



Directions for the crab cakes

Start by melting the butter in a small saucepan. Mix in the flour and stir until well combined. Then gradually add the milk and stir until it's smooth.

Add mashed potato in the milk mixture. Mix well.

In a fry pan, carmelise the onion.  Add the crab meat onion and stir fry for a bit.  Add salt, pepper and wine to season.

Add the crab mixture to the potato and milk.  Remove from heat and set aside to cool enough to handle easily.

Lay out 3 medium-size bowls, one containing flour, one with the beaten egg and the last containing bread crumbs. Line a tray with wax paper to hold the finished crab cakes.

With your hands, take some crab mixture and shape into a ball, about 3 cm in diameter.

Dredge the ball in the flour. Remove it and shake off any excess flour. Then dip it in the egg until coated. Remove and shake off the excess egg. Finally, roll the crab in the bread crumbs. Flatten into a disc and place on the tray. Repeat for the rest of the crab cakes.

Heat the oil in the deep fryer or pan. The oil should be at least 5 cm deep to be effective. Otherwise the oil will cool too much when the cakes are added.

Have a plate lined with paper towels ready to drain the crab cakes as they're finished frying.

Once the oil is medium hot, add a crab cake, two at a time into the pan. They'll float to the surface. Watch them carefully and turn once when browned. Remove from the oil and onto the cooling plate. Repeat for all.  The purpose of the frying is to brown the breadcrumbs.  The crab mixture is already cooked so you don't need to deep fry for long, and not a very high temperature.

Serve while still hot along with the dipping sauce in small bowls.

Makes about 20 crab cakes.

Vietnamese Tomato-Noodle Soup

Vietnamese Tomato-Noodle Soup

Here's a warming noodle soup. So good yet I've never seen it available in any restaurant. Then The Wonder Woman introduced it to me and now it's one of my all-time favourite dishes. It's called soup but there's not much liquid in it, as you can see from the photo. Very satisfying.

The Wonder Woman says this is a modified version. The original recipe uses meat from small crabs. Just another way to use every bit of the crab.

Like a lot of Asian dishes, this needs lots of prep up front then the cooking time is fairly short.

This recipe is enough for 3 - 4 large bowls. And these bowls really are larger than your typical soup bowl.

Some ingredients

Soup ingredients

• peanut oil for frying
• 4 cloves garlic, crushed or finely chopped
• 250 g ground pork (1/2 lb) (optional)
• 2 x 160 g cans of chopped shrimp or crab with spices (we use one of each). Use only one can if you want a taste that's not as strong, but we like two.
• 1.5 l water (6 cups)
• 3 tomatoes, chopped
• 1 egg, broken into a bowl and gently mixed (optional)
• 125 ml coriander leaves, washed and chopped (1/2 cup)
• 125 ml bean sprouts (1/2 cup)
• 5 ml fish sauce (1 tsp) or to taste

More ingredients

Toppings for the bowl

• 200 g rice vermicelli, soaked in warm water for several hours
• 1 lime, sliced into wedges
• 1 head of leaf lettuce
• 100 g bean sprouts (1/4 lb)
• tofu puffs, 4 - 5 puffs per bowl, prepared as below (optional)
• shrimp, 4 - 5 per bowl, depending on size, prepared as below (optional)

Cans of spiced prawns

Shrimp just about finished frying

Shrimp

Here's how to prepare the best fried shrimp you'll ever have. We purchase frozen shrimp that are of size 31 - 40 per pound, uncooked with the shell on. Those are the most flavourful. Defrost the shrimp in a bowl of cold water on the countertop. After defrosting, shell them. Put the meat back into the bowl and season lightly with salt and pepper. Let them sit in the fridge for 20 minutes.

Start the frying pan on medium-high heat. When the pan is hot, add a bit of oil and add the shrimp. Saute for a short time. Turn the shrimp once. Remove the shrimp to a plate once it's just turned pink. It's important to not overcook the shrimp. Otherwise they'll be tough and rubbery.

Take the shrimp out of the pan, place them on a plate then set them aside until assembling the soup.

Bow-Tie Calico inspects the tofu puffs before they're put under the broiler

Tofu puffs

Rinse the tofu puffs in warm water to get rid of the oil. Drain. Slice the puffs in half, season them with some garlic powder and salt and arrange in a single layer on a cookie sheet. Toast lightly under a broiler until crisp and barely turning brown. Remove from the broiler and set them aside until you put the soup together.


Make the soup broth

Heat a wok or deep frying pan over medium high heat. Add some peanut oil when the pan is hot. Add the garlic to the wok and saute for a short time.

Add the ground pork if using. Break it up and fry until it's no longer pink.

Garlic and a can of spiced prawns

Add a can of spiced shrimp and stir and fry for a couple of minutes.

Add the water and the second can of spiced shrimp or crab. Cover and bring to a boil.

Just after adding the tomatos

Add the tomatoes. Return the soup to a boil and cook for 2-3 minutes.

Adding the coriander

Add the bean sprouts, the coriander and the egg. Stir gently to mix the egg into the broth. Bring everything back to a boil and it's ready to serve.

Ready for the bowl

Assembly

1. Place the rice noodles in the bowls.
2. Pour the soup broth on top.
3. Arrange lettuce leaves, shrimp, tofu puffs, sprouts and lime wedges on top.

Serve

Serve with a spoon and chopsticks (or fork). Squeeze the lime wedges into the soup and dig in. Have your favourite hot sauce available for those who like it spicy!

Fried Clams and Poutine râpée

I recently posted about the lobster and steamed clams and pie from our recent vacation while visiting the Admiral Catnap (retired) and the Admiral Catnap (retired), i.e., my parents. I also want to show other dishes we eat while there. The food is unique to the area and worthwhile seeking out.

Fried Clams

Fried Clams

This is one of the few deep-fried dishes I never fail to get. But since it's usually only once per year, my conscience is clean.

Fried clams are a speciality of the area. I know of half a dozen restaurants which serve them, including a fast-food chain. There are some in south-eastern New Brunswick and in Maine. They are nowhere else in the world, as far as I know. Please let me know in the comments below if you know of any outside this area. I'd love to visit others.

Fred's

The best of all the restaurants my family and I tried is Fred's Restaurant in Cap Pele. It is consistently tops in my own experience, and in the one or two reviews I heard about. The original Fred sold the business many years ago and I don't know if the recipe was his invention or was perfected by one of his successors.

How do they prepare the fried clams?

Fried Clams

They start with fresh clams. They are usually not local to the restaurant's area but are within a couple of hundred kilometres. Nova Scotia is a popular source. The clams are made ready for eating, meaning cleaned of any sand or grit, and shucked. I very rarely get a shell fragment in the clams and never any sand.

They then coat the clams in pancake batter, which may or may not be an insider secret. That's right, their excellent batter is nothing more than commercial pancake mix. Coating the clams is a messy process and involves mixing the clams into the batter using their hands.

From the batter, the clams go into the deep fryer, where they're cooked to perfection every time. The servers wouldn't tell us any secrets to this, similar to how double-frying is best for french fries.

Then from the deep-fryer to the table, a short a trip as possible. When eating deep-fried it's always best to be hot and fresh from the fryer.

Homemade Onion Rings

We get the homemade onion rings for a side. They are just what you expect, rings of onion with batter and deep fried. Mmmmmm, a deep-fried dish to accompany a deep-fried dish. The batter for the rings is different and probably contains some bread crumbs.

We are always a group of four or more and we all love clams, so we end up getting 3 or more platters of clams plus a side of rings. The technique we've hit on is to ask them to bring out the platters one at a time, 10 minutes apart. This way, we share each platter and it ensures a supply of fresh, hot clams for everyone.



Poutine râpée

This dish is more subtle than the fried clams.

Forget everything you know about the Canadian fast food speciality of poutine, the french fries and cheese curds and gravy that's popular in most of the larger cities. The chip wagons serve nice poutine but that's not what I'm talking about.

Poutine râpée

Poutine râpée, despite the similar name, is quite different than poutine. It's an Acadian dish and goes something like this.

They start with cooked pork. Sometimes salted, but the ones we get are not salted pork.  The pork is wrapped in a mixture of potatoes. Part mashed potatoes and part raw grated potatoes. They are about 10 cm in diameter. The balls are boiled for a long time, perhaps an hour or more.

The balls are then served with a little of the cooking water, which now resembles a thin potato gravy. We put them in bowls, and top with fresh-ground black pepper and occasionally hot sauce.

They are a little bland but good. They're a delicious treat worth every bite. The pork looks a bit pink but it is cooked and safe to eat.

We get ours from a small store near Grand-Digue, and it's in the middle of nowhere. We take our own plastic container as we buy enough for everyone.


Next time you're in south-east New Brunswick be sure to seek out these regional dishes. You'll thank yourself.

Boiled Lobster

Beer and lobster.  Mmmmm

On vacation, once again, at the lobster capital of the world, so what else could we do?  Boil some lobster, of course.

Fresh out of water and very aggressive

Yes, we've all heard the arguments about cruelty to animals, but I don't know of any better way to kill them, so as far as I'm concerned, this is the most humane way.

Our usual supplier got us 10 lobster for six people.  They were all about 700g, so were ideal.  They all had lots of meat and were not too tough.  These came from very cold water, so their shells were thick and very hard.

We had a mix of 5 females and 5 males, which was a good split, considering our audience.  We all have our preferences as to which is better and seem to debate it every time we gather for our feast.

Our menu pretty much always consists of::

Admiral Catnap's propane burner and pot

• Lobster
• Butter for dipping
• Potato salad
• Crusty rolls.  These are great for putting the green liver on, for easier eating
• Wine and beer.  Responsibly used, of course.

Here's how we cooked the lobster.

Take a humongous pot, and fill it with sea water.  Add a generous handful of salt.  Yes, this seems like overkill, but the extra salt brings out the flavour.

Put the pot on a large burner, cover it and bring to a boil.

In the meantime, prepare the lobster.  In our case, this meant removing the rubber bands from around the claws.  If you don't, then the rubber will "flavour" the cooking water and that's never a good thing.

When the water boils, add the lobster (and listen for the "screams").  Bring the water back to a boil.

Just after adding the lobster

Reduce the heat and boil for 20 minutes.  Enjoy the colour change as the shells go from dark green to bright red.

After the 20 minutes are up, remove them from the water and bring them to the table.

Nearly cooked

Enjoy!  Make sure everyone has access to picks, crushers and maybe knives to get at all the delicious meat.

Removing the lobster

In our family, everyone has their favourite part of the lobster.

• Some of the easiest meat to get at is the legs.  Break the legs at the joints and suck out the meat from the shells.
• Just where the legs attach to the bodies is some of the tenderest and sweetest meat on the lobster.  The main body has some morsels, but only eat what you can shake out of it.  Don't eat the head.
• The claws and arms have great morsels, but require the most work.
• The tail has the largest piece of meat and is not too difficult to remove, but is often the toughest meat.  Just be sure to remove the "vein" from inside as this is not pleasant to eat.
• Females sometimes contain some eggs, or roe.  This is a bright red mass that's solid once cooked.  These are an extra special treat for those of us who like it.

Stacking on the platter

Quite often we barter pieces of lobster with each other.  Commodore Catnap and I often trade a tail for two claws. So everyone gets more of their favourite.  Sometimes it's difficult to say how many lobsters we eat.  But generally speaking, we have one or two per person.

Steamed Softshell Clams

A plate of the finest

One dish that's always on our list of "must eats" at the cottage is steamed clams.  Or maybe steamed mussels.  But this time, it's clams.

The local clam is the softshell clam.   This batch was larger than we're used to, but they were still tasty and not a bit tough or chewy.  They had more sand and grit that we wanted.  If you get clams that are freshly dug, here's a tip: put the clams in a bucket of fresh seawater and let them sit for a day.  They "spit" their sand as part of their natural filtering process and your meal will be more enjoyable.

Be sure to examine the clams before they're cooked and discard any that the shells aren't tightly closed.  Those could be dead or less than fresh, which don't make for good eating.  Likewise, don't eat any that haven't opened their shells after cooking.  Those probably aren't worth eating either.


Method 1

This is our preferred method these days, where we steam the clams in a large pot.  For this, we need:

The pot and propane burner

• a good supply of clams
• a little bit of fresh water
• a large pot on a good burner
• a slotted ladle
• serving trays
• some melted butter for dipping.  Ideally, everyone should have their own dish
• optional: finely chopped garlic for the butter.  Some like it, some don't
• fresh-ground pepper
• coffee mugs

Simply dump the water in the bottom of the pot.  In our case, it was about a litre of water which barely covered the bottom of the monster pot.  Then we put in the clams and put the pot on the burner and turned it to high.

At the start of cooking

The water will boil and turn into steam which starts to cook the clams. Then, the clams will open enough to release their own liquid, which falls to the bottom of the pot.  This cools the pot slightly and it goes off the boil. But it eventually boils again, and continues cooking.

This is the type of dish I can't put a firm time to cook, as it depends on the size of the pot, the temperature of the burner and the amount of clams you are cooking, but watch them carefully and look for them to open.  That's when you'll know they're done.

Some have opened, others not yet

Scoop them out with a ladle, bring them to the table and make sure everyone has a good supply of melted butter for dipping.  Be sure to remove the outer casing from around the neck.  Otherwise the entire clam is edible.  Watch them disappear.

On the picnic table

A nice accompaniment for the clams is the liquid at the bottom of the pot.  Scoop it into coffee mugs, put a few drops of melted butter and a couple of grinds of black pepper for a delicious drink! We call it dross, though I'm not sure why.  Any dictionary I've seen makes dross sound less tasty than it is.  Salt content is high, though.

A mug of dross

Method 2

We used to do it this way back, quite a few years ago, when the beach still had some sand on it.

We would build a large bonfire in a sand pit using mostly driftwood.  After the fire had burned down to mostly embers, we'd place a large metal mesh on top.  Then, the clams go on top of the mesh and a thick layer of seaweed covers all.  It would take 20 to 30 minutes for the clams to finish cooking this way.

When the clams opened from the heat, they'd drop their liquid onto the embers which created enough steam to cook them.

Then we'd gather them from the mesh and eat.  They'd taste great, although the clams were drier than the first method.