Crab Cakes!

My dinner plan that night was to have asparagus and flavored rice. I had had several packets of flavored rice forever, and was going to finally use them. Sadly, both had been destructed by moths. I have never had a issue with moths until this year. I seem to have eradicated them, but occasionally will find their destruction. Who knew moths ate food? Well, one type, anyways. Don't go killing every moth you see, just these ones. Anyways, in searching for something else to eat with my asparagus, I found a can of crab meat...maybe I can make crab cakes! I pulled out my Old Bay seasoning box, and indeed, there was a recipe: Chesapeake Old Bay Crab Cakes. Upon looking at the website, I also found this one...sounds good, too. Perhaps I will try that one someday.

• The can of crab meat was only a 1/4 lb, so I quartered everything in the recipe, with the exception of the egg, and I used 1/4 tsp Dijon mustard.
• I did not have fresh bread, so instead of using a 1/2 slice of bread, I used 1/3 cup bread crumbs. They probably helped soak up a little of the extra egg moisture, too.
• Check this out to see how to make bread crumbs yourself; from an older website of mine. It's a great use for stale bread, or the end pieces, if you don't like eating those.
• My recipe made 7 crab cakes - enough to feed 2 or 3 people.

Key ingredients :)

Pretty asparagus, cut and rinsed.

Bread crumbs, mayonnaise, Old Bay, parsley, and mustard.

One of my pretty brown CSA eggs!

Everything mixed up!

Crab patties! I used my large cookie dough scoop to portion them out, then pattied them with my hands.

I sprayed a little oil on my skillet, and fried them for 5 minutes on each side.

Mmm.

Asparagus just takes a few minutes, so I cooked these while the last batch of cakes cooked. Just a little oil, garlic, and bit of salt.



So pretty, so tasty!

"Marsala" Chicken and Asparagus

So, I had mushrooms and asparagus from my CSA that I thought I'd use with chicken. Marsala chicken, I thought. Well, plans changed as I realized my mushrooms had gotten a bit too fungal and probably weren't good to use any more. No matter, I forged ahead. I found this recipe using my Epicurious app, and it appears also on the website. It is apparently from Gourmet, June 1995. Here are my changes:

• There's just one of me, so I did a third of the recipe, with one chicken breast and it made two light meals.
• I used green onion instead of onion, and added a clove of garlic.
• Didn't have chicken broth, so I made up that volume using half water, half wine.
• No Marsala wine, so I used some wine I didn't really enjoy drinking, a semi-sweet rose.
• Didn't have parsley, instead used the green onion greens.

Asparagus is pretty quick to cook; I just used some fresh garlic, olive oil, and salt for that. While the last steps of the chicken were being completed, I cooked the asparagus.

Here's the ingredient list I used for the chicken:

• 1/2 tbsp olive oil
• 1-2 garlic cloves
• 1 tbsp butter plus 1/2 tbsp
• 3 green onions - tops for garnish
• 3 tbsp wine
• 1/3 cup water + wine
• salt to taste

When prepping green onions, I cut off the rooty bit and any sad-looking ends of the greens.

Here you can see where I separate the denser more onion-like part from the green leafy part.

Veggies prepped! Again, kept the greens and whites of the onions separate, one garlic clove for the asparagus.

Since I live alone, I usually divide up my meat and freeze part. Rolling down the baggies helps keep them open, and helps keep meat juice from the outside of the bag (bit of a germaphobe here). Putting a single serving in a bag makes things quick and easy when I want to defrost one in the fridge.

To the right: On low heat I melted the butter with the garlic in it.
To the left: Garlic in olive oil for asparagus. I put this on very low heat to let the garlic infuse into the oil.

I cut the breast in half, as directed, and tried to make all pieces about the same thickness. I used lemon pepper and salt to season.

Chicken just lightly browned - wanted to keep it juicy!

Here's the wine I used; sadly did not enjoy drinking, but excellent for food!

I believe I left all the fat in the skillet after the chicken, and cooked the onions until they were transparent.

Added chicken back, and cooked some more.

The lovely sauce - it was so good!

Here's the asparagus, just rinsed.

Added into the slowly heated garlic in olive oil during the second chicken cooking.

Just takes 5 or so minutes to cook on medium heat. Right at the end I added half of my green onion greens.

 

Used the second half of green onion greens to garnish chicken - how pretty is this? And so tasty!