I guess I should first say that apart from the basics, I didn’t have many preconceived ideas about making crab cakes. A while ago now Danika and I were thinking about crab cakes, and how we used to pay a small fortune for them at a local store (that shall remain nameless..). Sometimes money is a great motivator, so I decided to go ahead and make my own. A few iterations later, and this is what came out. The crab cakes are a mix of crab meat (well duh..), choppedVidalia onion, chopped parsley, chopped roasted piquillo peppers, dijon mustard, chopped capers, seasoning, panko, and an egg. This is all mixed together, and formed into the definitive crab cake shape… a cylinder! These are then coated in a little more panko, and bunged in the fridge, whilst I got everything else togehter.

The pepper jam is wonderfully simple, and really tastes great. It is a mix of roasted piquillo and roasted red peppers, chopped up. This is boiled with some red wine vinegar, and sugar, until most of the liquid is gone. Into the blender it goes, and out comes a slightly chunky, slightly loose jam. A little more heat, and then an ice bath, and this sets up to be a pretty decent, super fast jam.

Ohh.. and chips. Coming from Blightly, we don’t use the term “fry”. French fries are chips. You get strange looks in the UK if you call em french fries. Heck, you would get even stranger looks (and a black-eye in some places!) if you called them “Freedom Fries”. So, these are chips. They aren’t American chips, or as us Brits  call them “crisps”. They are English chips.. There, glad I cleared that up. In the absence of any good sized potatoes, and the fact that I had a couple of glasses of wine so I couldn’t go to the store, I decided to use fingerlings. These are sliced up using a Japanese slicer. Wonderful little tool that.. Saves so much time prepping stuff, and you get nice uniformly sliced veggies. I can whole heartedly recommend buying one.. They are pretty cheap too. I opt for the stainless steel blade, rather than the ceramic for a few reasons. Firstly, ceramic is pretty brittle, and I can be clumsy sometimes. Second, I can remove this blade and sharpen it when needed, which I cannot do with a ceramic blade. Oh, and the stainless are generally cheaper too!

So, the potatoes are sliced, and then roasted in the oven after tossing with some olive oil. Every now and then, I toss them again, make sure they are cooking evenly. When they are done, I dry them off with paper towel, and toss them with salt, parsley and a little white truffle oil. They turn out really great. Crispy, still soft in the middle, and really fragrant. Quick to make too!

So, that was dinner. No profound words today.. No funky back stories to the dish. Just the fact that we like crab cakes, but don’t like to buy them. Oh, and that we love potatoes. I hear that Tom Douglas has a cookbook on crab cakes.. I might well have to pick that up.