May 4, 2014 New Recipes: Crab Louie stuffed avocado salads
with minted potato salad
We woke up feeling better as the stomach bug that has bedeviled
us for the last few days subsided and began thinking about a more interesting
menu. My original idea was something
really bland like a crab omelet, but when we went to our garden this morning and Suzette saw all the mint growing she mentioned that since the Kentucky
Derby was yesterday, we should make mint
juleps. So we decided to make mint
juleps, which meant that we needed to go to Costco to buy a new bottle of
bourbon.
When we uncovered our raised bed that we had planted before
we went to Europe we saw beautiful Mbuna and red giant radish leaves (two
oriental greens) and decided to make a crab salad instead of an omelet.
When
we returned to the house and examined the avocados I had bought the other day
at Pro’s Ranch Market (4 for $.99), Suzette suggested that we make avocados
stuffed with crab meat. Since we had PPI
cocktail sauce from our fresh oyster dinner last week, I suggested that we use
that dress the crab meat and stuff the avocados with Crab Louie,
For the potato salad, I had bought a 10 lb. bag of potatoes
for $1.49 at Pro’s Ranch Market last Wednesday when I bought the oysters and
avocados. Suzette suggested that we make
a light, cool meal by making potato salad with fresh celery and mint from
our garden.
This is the mental process that led to the menu for
tonight’s menu.
After we uncovered the raised bed with the greens and radishes
and turnips and beets, we cleared that bed and the old garden of weeds a bit
and filled the bird bath, adjusted and replaced several non-functioning
sprinkler heads in the garden, uncovered and washed down the chairs and tables
from their winter hibernation and arranged the tables and furniture in our back
yard and the garden to make them ready for a dinner party.
Suzette took a shower, while I peeled, rough cut and boiled
six potatoes and three eggs for the potato salad. When the potatoes and eggs were cooked,
Suzette peeled the eggs and put them and the potatoes into a bowl in the fridge
and I fetched a bottle of champagne and a bottle of 2012 Le Pont Bandol rosé
from the basement and put them into the fridge.
We drove to Home Depot for additional garden sprinkler
supplies and Costco around 1:30. Costco
was packed. It seems like lots of out of
town folks come to Costco on the weekends, but since we were hungry and needed
to replenish our liquor, we grabbed a cold drink and a basket and wound our way through the crowd of busy shoppers. We
went to the liquor department first and selected 1.75 liter bottles of each of
bourbon, dark rum, and gin, a bottle of Mac Murray Ranch Pinot Gris, and a case
of Modelo beers with 12 bottles each of Negra and Especial. Then we foraged the food sample stands. We liked the chicken tamales the best, but
also tried beef and bean burritos, and pulled beef on tortillas. After satisfying our hunger, we picked up lamb
chops, a bag of lemons, a container of fresh blueberries, a container of Fage
Greek style yogurt, a carton of eggs, pretzels, coffee, and several other
items.
At 4:30 after a short nap, we went to the kitchen to start dinner.
.
Potato Salad
We decided to make the potato salad first. Suzette handed me three stalks of celery and
one-half of a white onion that I finely chopped and Suzette went to the garden
and plucked the leafy heads of several stalks of celery. She then took the chopped onion and celery and placed them in the Cuisinart bowl with 1 ½ cups each of
loose mint leaves and the fresh celery head leaves and blended them with 2/3
cup of mayonnaise and 1 Tbsp. of lemon juice and a dash of white pepper into the dressing, while I cut the eggs into small squares with a egg
slicer. We then dressed the potato salad
by folding the dressing into the eggs and potatoes.
Crab Louie
I opened a 16 oz. can of Harbor Seafood crabmeat (which looked like mostly claw meat) we had bought
at Sprouts Farmer’s market and put it in a bowel. Then I added about ½ cup of mayonnaise to the
approximately ¾ cup of PPI cocktail sauce (ketchup, Long’s horseradish and
lemon) and added a little lemon juice, ketchup and a Tbsp. of capers to it bring it
to the right taste. I then added the
Louie sauce to the crab and stirred it until it was mixed in but the crab meat
was still intact. Then we covered the
crab meat with the Louie sauce with saran and put it in the fridge to chill.
At around 6:00 Cynthia and Ricardo arrived, bringing a
bottle of bourbon. When it became
obvious that neither Suzette or I knew how to make a proper mint julep, Ricardo started
making the mint juleps. He crushed the
mint in a mortar and pestle with crushed ice and the bourbon. Then he added that to the glasses with some
of the simple syrup we had made that morning and more crushed ice and topped
the drink off with a sprinkle of powdered sugar. We all grabbed our glasses and went for a tour of
the garden (Cynthia, who is a landscape architect, had helped us design the raised bed area) and sat outside in the new gazebo area and talked until Amy, my ex-wife, arrived at
around 6:45.
When Amy arrived we plated up the salads. I sliced avocados into halves and put two
halves on each plate. We filled the avocados with the crab Louie
and I freshened up the PPI lemon and olive oil dressing, sitting on the counter
top and lightly drizzled the salads with dressing. Then we put a scoop of potato salad on each
plate and I garnished each plate with two caper berries.
 |
| Garden with gazebo on left in back |
 |
| Crab Louie and potato salads |
I toasted slices of whole grain bread from Costco and took
the bread to the table and we sat in the garden and ate our dinners. The Bandol had an exquisitely light taste and
a golden peach color in the setting sunlight, which went well with the crab Louie. Actually, the slightly pasty texture of the prepared mayonnaise in the crab Louie actually
overpowered the refined elegance of the Bandol a bit, but alas, we had chosen
not to make our own mayonnaise.
After dinner Suzette and I decided to open the Fage Greek
style yogurt and we placed a dollop of yogurt into small bowls with fresh
blueberries we had bought at Costco. In France
yogurt is referred to as “white cheese”.
I had decided to celebrate this first evening dinner party since our return from vacation
with a sip of good port, so I opened a Fonseca 2005 Late Bottled Vintage Port
(Costco $20.00 in 2013). A one day tour to the port growing area in Portugal does not make me an expert on port, but based on
what we were told at Quinta de Tedo in the Duoro River Valley, I think i can explain the production of late bottled port. All port
starts from the common crush of all the grapes within the vineyard’s growing
area that are fermented and placed in large 1500 liter wooden oak barrels to age.
Some of the wine is placed in smaller approximately 300 liter wooden oak barrels. The port in the smaller barrels is the tawny,
because it takes on a lighter, more brown color and a nutty more caramelized
taste. Tawny can be aged in the smaller
barrels for long periods of time. We
drank a forty year old tawny. The remaining
port in the big barrels is ruby port. After
two or three years, if a vintage is deemed to be exceptional, it is awarded a designation
of “vintage”. Some of the ruby is then
bottled as vintage port and allowed to age in bottles as vintage port. The rest of the ruby port is either sold as
ruby or after several more years of aging in the large tank may be bottled as “late
bottled vintage” port. Since I bought my
late bottled vintage port in 2013, it is impossible to know when it was
bottled, but we were told that it is usually sold within a year after it is
bottled. Although the label said unfiltered, I never
say any sediment in the bottle, so it must have been carefully bottled to avoid
any sediments. We loved the port and several
of us sipped several glasses.
At around 9:30 we all said goodnight after a lovely dinner party in the garden.
Bon Appétit
No comments:
Post a Comment