October 20, 2019 Brunch – Crab Cakes with Salad and Tartare Sauce. Dinner – Green Pork Mole with Brown Rice

Another restful day.  I watched the news and Man U play Liverpool while we peeled and quartered the second box of quinces from Szuzette’s Orchard at the Center for Ageless Living.

I was hungry for breakfast, so at 9:30 I toasted a bagel and smeared it with cream cheese and garnished it with thin slices of red onion and cod roe paste.

Then around 11:30 as soon as we finished peeling quinces Suzette made crab cakes.  She used her favorite recipe from the Williamsburg Cookbook. With one modification that I requested.  Instead of mixing in the two eggs, she separated the whites from the yolks and I whisked the whites into soft mounds, which gave the crab cakes a slight lift and airier texture, more like the Soufflé we made last night.  That change resulted in the crab cakes tasting like the ones I ate at the Baltimore Tennis Club that my cousins, the Banks, treated me to when i visited them in Baltimore when I was in college.

My father had two sisters and a brother.  His older sister, Libbie, had two daughters, Selma and Harriet.  Selma married Stanley, who worked for Sara Lee in Cleveland.  Selma owned an Ad agency in Cleveland.  Harriet took a degree from Johns Hopkins and married Joseph Banks’ son Howard and lived in Baltimore. They owned the Joseph Banks Clothiers that has now become a national chain of mens’ stores.  They built their brand on the Ivy League, natural shoulder, cut of suits and jackets.

Suzette suggested we lay crab cakes on chopped Savoy cabbage and garnish with tomato and avocado slices and then make a Tartare sauce to create a Deconstructed Cole slaw.  I thought that was an interesting idea, especially since we had all the ingredients.  I chopped four leaves of Savoy cabbage into bite sized pieces and the sliced two tomatoes and an avocado into thin slices and garnished two plates.  While Suzette was making and frying the crab cakes, I made

 Tartare sauce

By combining about 1 T. of chopped shallot with the juice of ½ lemon and adding 2 T. of red onion finely diced, 2 tsp. of capers, 2/3 cup of mayo, and 3 T. of  pickle relish.

Suzette put ice in the ice bucket and chilled the bottle of Gruet Blanc de Noir and took it out to the
table in the garden.   When the Tartare Salad was prepared, Suzette lay two warm crab cakes on the pile of Savoy lettuce and we garnished them with Tartare sauce and carried them to the garden and ate a lovely brunch in the garden.

We marvel at the quality of food we enjoy.  It is really only possible because of the arrangement we have developed for cooking.  I shop and prepare the menus or make sure we have the ingredients we need for dishes.  For example, I bought a 1 lb. container of crab meat at Costco a week or two ago and we bought eggs yesterday at El Super.

The only ingredient we did not have for the crab cake recipe today was fresh bread crumbs, so Suzette toasted a plain bagel and ground it into bread crumbs in the Cuisinart to form the crab cakes with egg.

Here is the recipe.

 We also had some steamed asparagus left from dinner that we added to the plates.  We did not like the Blanc de Noir as much as last night’s Gruet 2012 Blanc de Blanc, but as I reminded Suzette the Blanc de Blanc cost three times as much as the Blanc de Blanc and is a vintage champagne.  So there are noticeable differences between the two.
We nibbled several chocolate chip oatmeal, raisin and walnut cookies during the day.

At 6:30 Willy came over for dinner.  We decided to eat PPIs instead of cooking a new meal.  Suzette heated the last of the Green Pork Mole and the brown rice and Couscous.  She and I ate the mole.
Willy heated the PPI Poached Salmon and ate it with Couscous for a repeat of Wednesday’s dinner party meal.  The mole was better than ever, proving the old adage that stew is always better the fourth day.

After dinner we nibbled cookies and watched The Durrells in Corfu.  Willy left at 8:00 and we watched Poldark and Suzette went to bed at 9:00 and I went to bed at 10:00 after the Cowboys beat The Eagles and I watched the episode of PBS’ new series, “Press” with a cup of camomile/Manzanilla tea and a cookie.

A pleasant end to a pleasant day.

Bon Appetit