Accidental Crab Cakes

The crab fishery has been declared a disaster in the Chesapeake Bay and crab is hardly seasonal this time of year. But most catering clients don't give a lick about sustainability or seasonality. Hence, it's possible to end up with a leftover pound of crab meat in the fridge, probably from someplace in Southeast Asia purchased at Costco.

What to do?

In our case, there was no choice but to invite friends over for my wife's superb crab cakes. I could not think of any way to turn this into a winter menu, we just followed our best instincts and made some of our favorite three-hour braised green beans and the cheese grits we've been focused on this week.

The final menu looked like this

Salad

Tender Greens w/ Honeycrips Apple, Toasted Walnuts, Dried Cranberries

Entree

Crab Cakes w/ Tartar Sauce

Green Beans Braised w/ Tomato and Fennel Seed

Cheese Grits

Dessert

Sweet Potato Pie w/ Vanilla Whipped Cream

Naturally, I received a thorough thrashing from my wife for purchasing green beans in January. Oh, the ignomy of it all. Mea culpa.

The secret to successful crab cakes is to handle the meat as little as possible. In Crisfield, Maryland, for instance, once the world's crab picking capital, a crab cake likely as not will consist of a pile of choice lump meat barely breaded and placed under a broiler to brown. Most cook's ignore this tradition or are completely ignorant of it. That's why so many crabcakes you see in restaurants have the density and resiliency of a hockey puck that has spent too much time in a deep fryer.

My wife's method is to combine 1 pound of lump crab meat with 1/2 cup fresh bread crumbs--that usually means a couple of dinner rolls pulled into small pieces. Combine with 1 beaten egg, 2 teaspoons Dijon mustard, 1/2 teaspoon worcesterhire sauce, a tablespoon chopped parsely, a dash or two of Tabasco and salt and pepper to taste. Gently toss all the ingredients together and let the mixture sit in a bowl for an hour or more. This will help the cakes hold together in the cooking and give the flavors some time to meld.

Next, pour canola oil into a heavy skillet to a depth of about 1/2 inch and heat to medium high. Gently form the crab mixture into 4 jumbo puck shapes, or 5 or 6 large cakes. Place the crab cakes in the hot oil and brown on both sides, turning them gently with a slotted spatula. Remove the cakes to paper towels to drain, then arrange them on a baking sheet and place in a 300 degree oven for about 15 minutes to cook through.

For her tartar sauce, my wife mixes mayonnaise with a bit of finely chopped red onion, some chopped capers, pickle relish, a little juice from the pickle relish jar, and some Old Bay seasoning.

A lot of chefs claim to have secret methods for making crab cakes but this one is better than any other I've seen. The green beans, cooked to death, come to the plate dripping their magical, fennel-scented broth, which runs into the cheese grits to make a delicious muddle. We washed the whole thing down with a wonderful Vouvray wine.

Unless you happen to have a pound of crab meat in your refrigerator already, however, do give the crabs a break and wait until summer to enjoy this meal.

Green Beans with Sauteed Cherry Tomatoes

This is a great match: our meaty, full-flavored Romanette green beans with sweet Dr. Carolyn cherry tomatoes.

We think these golden cherry tomatoes are the best ever, with an assertive sweetness and round flavor. I was happy to see our opinion confirmed in the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange catalogue. "The most flavorful yellow cherry tomato we have grown," they write. "It has an excellent balance of sugar, tartness and depth of flavor."

In case you are wondering where "Dr. Carolyn" comes from, the tomato is named for Dr. Carolyn Male, one of the country's foremost tomato experts and the author of "100 Heirloom Tomatoes for the American Garden." In fact, it was from that book that I first thought to purchase some Dr. Carolyn seeds.

We have just one plant in our garden this year, but it is covered with golden tomatoes--more than enough for us. Plus, the plant seems utterly resistant to the fungal diseases that otherwise ravage less sturdy tomato varieties in our hot, humid District of Columbia climate.

We are also in love with these Romanette beans, an Italian variety of flat bean that grows profusely on compact bush plants. So easy to grow, and so productive. They make a perfect side dish simply cooked in salted water, then dressed with olive oil and grated Parmesan cheese. But combining them with the Dr. Carolyn tomatoes results in an ecstatic mingling of late-summer flavors.

Simply get a non-stick saute pan very hot on the stove, coat the bottom with extra-virgin olive oil and drop in a small bowl full of halved cherry tomatoes. While they sizzle, season with coarse salt. Toss one or two times until the tomatoes are showing the faintest hint of brown and are beginning to melt. Then toss in cooked green beans, season with a little more salt and freshly ground black pepper. Drop in a few basil leaves cut into a chiffonade and a splash of sherry vinegar. Toss a couple of times until the beans are heated through.

The final result isn't exactly pretty, but you'll be eating it right out of the pan.

Green Beans Braised Three Hours

I know you may find this hard to believe but it's true. These green beans are cooked at least three hours.

And you know what? They could cook a little longer.

The recipe has a twisted pedigree. When I was in my youth, I spent a year in Switzerland. My Swiss host mother, Tante Marie, cooked big, fat green beans in a pressure cooker what seemed like forever. The beans emerged from that pressure cooker limp and dark and ugly. But boy, were they good. The best beans I'd ever tasted.

Then some years later I happened upon an article by food writer Corby Kummer in the Atlantic Monthly magazine. Corby made clear why those cooked-to-death green beans I'd eaten back in Switzerland tasted so good.

First, the flavor compounds in green beans take hours of cooking to fully develop. Second, green beans contain lots of lignin, the tough, fibrous material that's also found in wood, hemp, linen--lignin has to be cooked a long time to break down into something easily digestible.

So if you are still cooking green beans according to the Nouvelle Cuisine method--meaning boiled until just barely cooked, then dumped into a bowl of ice water--then you are getting green beans full of green color but no flavor.

Sorry, the compounds that govern flavor and color in green beans are completely different. You have to choose one or the other, and I choose flavor.

Kummer gave a recipe for cooking green beans with fennel seed that he'd gotten from Italian food writer Anna del Conte. I added bacon to make these a Southern version of green beans, and cooked them a lot longer.

The result is a kind of green bean ambrosia, tender beans with a bit of sweet anise flavor and the soul food depth of bacon. Onion and tomatoes round out the flavors.

This recipe was first published in The Washington Post Food Section, but then was selected for Houghton Mifflin's The Best American Recipes 2005-2006. The editors liked the beans so much, they came back the next year and published the recipe again in The 150 Best American Recipes, a kind of best-of-the-best from the publisher's previous "best of."

These beans cry out for a heap of corn bread to mop up the broth the vegetables create during their three-hour braising. The braising starts with just the liquid from the tomatoes. Hard as it may be to believe, the finished beans retain a slight bit of crunch even after such a long time on the fire.

These are just the thing to serve with barbecue, so I've been making a big mess of them for the Hope House Ho' Down we're catering this evening, featuring hizzoner the mayor of the District of Columbia, Adrian Fenty. Give these beans a try sometime.

For 6-8 servings:

1 pound green beans, trimmed and washed
1 medium yellow onion, pealed and cut into thin strips
1 14.5-ounce can diced tomatoes with juice
1 teaspoon freshly ground fennel seed
½ teaspoon salt
freshly ground black pepper to taste
2 tablespoons bacon fat (or canola oil)
2 thick slices bacon, cut into bite-size pieces

In a heavy pot or Dutch oven with a tight-fitting lid, heat the bacon fat or canola oil and cook the onion gently over medium heat until tender, about eight minutes. Add the remaining ingredients, toss together and bring to a simmer. Close the pot, reduce the heat to very low and simmer for about three hours, stirring and tasting the beans occasionally for doneness. When the beans are tender and flavorful, adjust seasoning and serve warm.