Saturday: Cake!

Since I've been increasingly disappointed by the KCC farmer's market, I decided to try to try the Hawaii Kai one.  It's much more of a drive, and it's a smaller market, but it has a number of advantages:

1. Fewer people.
2. Tighter focus on farm ingredients, and less so on prepared food.
3. The prepared that they do have is clustered, and they had a seating area.
4. The hours are 9-1, compared with the 7:30-11 of the KCC.  Guess which one is more conducive to my sleep schedule?

Of course, being smaller means the selection isn't as good.  I ended up with some lettuce (nice and green, but the leaves weren't as tight as the KCC place, making me suspect it wasn't as freshly picked), herbs (are herbs.  There's really only two states for herbs. Good and rotten.), and a bag of plum/Roma/about that size tomatoes.  $10 for the lot, which is a decent enough deal.  There was a guy with a box of lilikoi, but since the lady in front of me in line picked out two clearly rotten fruit, and the ones I could see were smooshed and nasty looking, I didn't buy any.  I'm not sure which one I'll go back to.  I think KCC if I wake up early, and HK if I don't.  

WF was next, for the remaining ingredients and a lunch burrito.  I need to start remembering that I don't really like WF burritos.  I miss Qdoba.

Next, came five hours of watching Thundercats.  I'll have to comment about that later (probably tomorrow).  Important point: there is significantly more genocide in Thundercats than I remember from my childhood.

Today's culinary adventure was Crab Cake Salad.  I started simple, and made the salad dressing first.

This was my base recipe for the dressing, which I changed around a bit since cilantro tastes like soap.  I ignored the rest of their ideas, as that cake is going to have a lot more unnecessary filler. You can see my herbs on the front tray.  The monkeys have the dill, the elephant has Italian parsley, the gator has some thyme.  I hadn't yet minced the green onion (background).  All of those were 1 tbs each.  I don't have grapeseed oil, so I simply used a 1/2c of olive oil.  You can see the 1/4c lemon juice, which I was able to extract from a single lemon (using my favorite lime juicer).  Mince mince dump dump, and a 1/2tsp Dijon, and then a quick blitz with the stick blender, and I had this:

I gave it a quick taste to make sure that it wasn't terrible, and then put it in the fridge to wait.

Next up was to get the crab cakes organized.  Again, back to the monkey plate:

That's a pound of crab meat (this was all WF had available. It wasn't as good as other crab I've had before, but it was fairly lumpy, which is a good thing, but had lots of tiny flakes, which I think is part of the reason I had some trouble later.  Still, this pound was something like $15, which is a deal compared to the $40? I think I paid in Austin), one egg, 1/4c mayo, elephant: 1tbs minced herbs (a leaf of basil, a couple of parsley, a sprig or two of dill), crocodile: 2tbs bread crumbs, monkeys: 1/2c minced green onion greens, walrus: 1.5-2tsp old bay.  Dump everything but the egg into a bowl:

fold it gently to try to keep the crab as lumpy as possible. I then quick beat the egg with my spatula, and then added that in, and mixed it together again.  I had to add a tablespoon more bread crumbs to get it to what I thought was sufficient for cohesion, and in hindsight I probably should have added a fourth.

At this point, I put the mix into the fridge to rest for a half hour.  Unfortunately, I was supposed to shape the cakes first, and then put them in the fridge.  Not a show stopper, but a bit annoying.  I think this also explains why I had more moisture than I wanted.  After resting, I shaped, getting this:

The recipe suggests making quarter pound cakes, but since I was doing this with a salad, I wanted smaller cakes, so I went with ~2oz ones instead.  These seemed fine now, but I only let them rest again in the fridge for about ten minutes.  I should have noticed that I had too much moisture.  I blame the following things for that:

• Smaller crab bits hold more moisture
• I should have added a bit more bread crumbs
• They didn't evaporate as much during the resting
• The humidity today was about 70% while I was making these. I've only made them in the winter before, so I've not had that problem before.

During the second rest, I organized the salad bit.  Pile of romaine, one of those plum tomatoes, two shiitake mushrooms.  Next, it was time to fry.  I dumped out a pile of flour, and cursed at the cakes as they refused to be cleanly picked up as I tried to dredge them.  I eventually sorted it out, as well as a wonderful double spatula method for turning them (lift with slotted spatula, put solid spatula on uncooked side after redusting with a bit more flour, flip, use slotted spatula to slide the cake back into the oil). If you want to be picky, you can s/spatula/turner/g that last sentence. Ok, frying:

The holding area:

And the final plating:

I added a few slices of baguette, and a sliver of Gouda, and paired it with a viognier I had in my pantry, as I remembered that it had a Riesling like sweetness that I was looking for.  

The crab cakes worked out wonderfully, despite the structural issues I had during the cooking.  Strong crab flavor, although, as usual, I think I should have put in more old bay.  Maybe a quick dash of cayenne or something would help as well. Oh. Yeah. Salt and pepper.  They're in there. I ground up both in the pestle, because I didn't want big chunky sea salt crystals surprising me. Double-"oh yeah": don't forget to sort the crab looking for shell bits.  That wouldn't be fun to bite into either.

The salad was good, particularly due to the dressing.  The lemon flavor cuts through nicely, and the herbs work well with the crab cake.  I think the dressing is my new default crab cake sauce for the future.  I don't like the mayo based ones in general, due to mayo being gross.

The last minute additions helped a bit as well.  The Gouda added a sour note that was both good and bad.  It didn't really mix with the sweet lemon and crabby...crab flavors.  However, it did work nicely to reset all the flavors, so that I didn't get burned out on the lemon sauce.  The wine had the sweet notes I was looking for, but it wasn't really that great. 

I put the leftover cakes into the freezer, since I don't really trust refrigerated anything-that-lives-in-the-sea.  They reheat nicely in the oven, so there shouldn't be any problems.