Crab Puppies

Tidedancers Crab Puppies



These have become an institution at parties we throw at our store, Tidedancers (tidedancers.com) and at our house. Guests must to love them. They disappear faster than shrimp.

INGREDIENTS

6 cups peanut oil (48 fl oz), for frying
2 c. yellow cornmeal
1 c. all-purpose flour
2 T. baking powder
2 T. sugar
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. black pepper
1 chopped Habanero pepper or ½ tsp. hot sauce (optional)
2 large eggs
1½ c. whole milk
6 large scallions, thinly sliced
1 lb. jumbo lump crab meat
Special equipment: a deep-fat thermometer

DIRECTIONS

Heat oil in a 4- to 5-quart heavy pot over high heat until it registers 330°F on thermometer.

While oil is heating, whisk together cornmeal, flour, baking powder, salt, and pepper in a bowl. Whisk together egg and milk in a small bowl, then add to cornmeal mixture and stir until combined. Fold in crab meat. Sauté scallions in a 1 T. butter until soft and stir into batter.

Using two teaspoons and working in batches, carefully add 1 rounded teaspoon of batter per hush puppy to hot oil and fry, turning, until golden, 2 to 3 minutes, then transfer with a slotted spoon to paper towels to drain briefly. Transfer hush puppies to a shallow baking pan and keep hot in 250 degree oven while frying remaining batter. Return oil to 330°F between batches.

You can also cheat with this recipe by using any good cornbread mix. Just follow directions and add crab, scallions and hot pepper or sauce (if using). Test one to be sure batter holds together. If not, add a bit of flour.

These are relatively small hush puppies and the recipe makes a mess of ‘em. Plenty for a cocktail party – unless our Bernese Mountain Dog Freude has been invited!



P.S. They also freeze well.

Changing Diets Daily

Balanced Diets



I figured this out watching my wife eat a plate of French triple cream cheese the other day.

Now Conni is a very diet and health conscious person. Her maintenance diet is basically low fat. But every once in a while, she will sit down and eat a plate of cheese. When she does, she simply announces that she is on a low carbohydrate diet. Then later in the day, she goes back to low fat. Conni finds nothing irrational in this. Neither do I.

Having lost over 600 pounds, I am no stranger to dieting myself. I have been on low fat diets, low carb diets, low calorie diets. You name it. I was even on an egg and wine diet once. It really worked. (You ate two hard boiled eggs for breakfast with black coffee. You ate two more hard boiled eggs for lunch – with a glass of wine. For cocktails, you had a glass of wine. Then for dinner, you made an omelet with whatever you wanted in it and then finished off the bottle of wine!. Two weeks, fifteen pounds! Just don’t tell your cardiologist!). Last year, I lost 12 pounds on a pâté and cheese diet. I am good at this dieting thing.

But Conni’s cheese trick was what really got me to thinking.

Basically, diets, like foods, fall into groups. There are the low fat diets (American Heart Association, Bahamian). There are the low calorie diets (you all know those – constant counting and boring, even if healthy and effective). There are all kinds of low carbohydrate diets (Atkins, etc.).

And there are what I call regional diets. There is the Mediterranean Diet. There is the South Beach Diet, (I always thought someone on the Western Shore should do a North Beach diet! It would have to be based on crabs and Bud Lite, though.). There is the Southwestern France Diet -- high in duck and goose fat. (I am not making this up. There really is.) There is the Baton Rouge or New Orleans Sugar Busters Diet. And there is my favorite of all – the Southern Sanity Diet – where two or three days a week you eat a breakfast with your favorite combination of grits, sausage, bacon, eggs, pancakes, and, of course, biscuits. But on the days you eat this behemoth meal, there’s no Pabst before lunch.

So what you have then are four food groups and four diet groups. Just as one is supposed to eat a certain number of servings from each of the food groups daily, the happy dieter should eat a certain number of servings from each of the four diet groups daily. I’ll show you how it works.

Here is a hypothetical day in a diet I could enjoy. For each item, I indicate the diet or diet group from which it comes.

Pre-Breakfast

Fruit (Bahamian – low fat)
Coffee with milk (Southwestern French)

Breakfast

Your favorite combination of:

bacon, sausage, eggs (low carb, Sugar Busters)
biscuits, pancakes (Southern Sanity – low nothing)
grits (low fat, Sugar Busters – except for the butter)

Mid Morning Snack

There is no way I can justify pastry or donuts. Skip this or eat an apple (low calorie).

Lunch

Linguini with shrimp with arugula and basil pesto (South Beach, Mediterranean, Sugar Busters)

Salad (low fat, low calorie, Sugar Busters)

Wine (Southwestern France)

One cookie (South Beach)

Afternoon Snack

Forget it, unless you are really into fruit (low fat)

Cocktail Hour

Martinis (low carb)
Olives (Mediterranean)
Peanuts (low carb)
Pâté (Southwestern France, low carb, Mediterranean)
Shrimp cocktail (low fat)
Carrot sticks (low calorie)

Dinner

Foie gras (Southwestern France) with apples (low fat) sautéed in butter (low carb)
White wine (low carb)
Rack of lamb (low carb, Mediterranean, Southwestern France)
Rice (low fat)
Ratatouille (low calorie, Mediterranean)
Red wine (Southwestern France)
Salad (low fat, low calorie)
Cheese plate (low carb) with crackers (low fat)
Strawberry Shortcake
Strawberries (low fat, low calorie)
Biscuit (Southern Sanity)
Whipped cream (low carb)
Faux espresso (if you are over 50, otherwise real espresso – low fat, low calorie, Sugar Busters)

Post Prandial

Cognac (low carb)
Chocolates (Come on. Go ahead. You have to allow yourself some treat on any diet!)

There you have it – balanced diets. During this hypothetical day, we will have eaten ten servings from the low fat diet group, nine servings from the low carbohydrate diet group, seven servings from the low calorie diet group, and seventeen servings from the regional diet group (there is some double counting here as some dishes fit into more than one category) – a day of balance and harmony.

The point of all this is simple – you need to know what foods fit into what diet group. That way, whenever you are about to tuck into some particularly delicious morsel, you can say to yourself, “It’s okay to eat this. It’s on the _____ diet.”

I promise you will not lose ten pound in two weeks on this diet -- but you may shed some guilt and you may just find a little peace and enjoy life just a little more. And isn’t that a significant part of what keeps us alive longer?

Have a good one.

Dr. Peter

Excuse me, do you have a...

In Your Drawers

I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.

C’mon, I know you’ve got one. We all have one.

OK, OK, I’ll go first. But then you promise, right?

Here’s how it happened.

On Thursday, we ran out of propane. When the guy came, he had to relight the pilots on our old Vulcan range. One of the burners had been giving me trouble. He said to check the holes on the side of the burner unit.

I should have thought of that. It had happened before, on our even older Vulcan in Kensington. That time, the nice guy from the Gas Company gave me a set of little reamer-like tools to get into the holes and get out the gunk.

I keep the set in the kitchen drawer. Not just any kitchen drawer, THE kitchen drawer – the one we all have, the one where we dump EVERYTHING!! You have one. I know you do.

Here’s what’s in mine – in addition to the set of reamers which I found after about 20 minutes!

• 7 clips that hold snack bags – all virginal -- does anybody ever USE these things?


• 1 cup to measure green coffee beans for roasting


• 1 brush for cleaning the coffee roaster


• 1 brush for cleaning a coffee grinder that burned up in our last house


• 2 coffee measuring scoops for roasted coffee


• 1 melon baller -- the rest of the set is somewhere else, I think.


• 5 packets of flower freshener


• 3 magnet clips for refrigerator – why aren’t the ON the refrigerator?


• 16 (count ‘em!) rubber Vacuvin wine stoppers – how many bottles of wine do two people ever have open at one time? Why do we need 16 of these things? How did we ever GET 16 of these things?


• 2 Vacuvin pumps to get the air out of wine bottles


• 3 champagne bottle stoppers


• 1 fancy rosewood wine stopper


• 1 old fashioned hand can opener – for when all the fancy ones can’t be found or don’t work


• 1 slightly more modern old fashioned hand can opener


• 1 really modern hand can opener that cuts the top off beneath the rim


• 3 church key bottle openers – for the two times a year when we open an imported bottle of beer without a twist off cap


• 1 antique bone handled bottle opener


• 1 silver plated bottle opener


• another silver plated bottle opener


• a faux ivory bottle opener and thing to punch holes in beer cans – sort of a fancy assed church key


• 1 wine stopper with an elephant on top – and we’re Democrats!


• 2 wine drip catchers


• 1 six inch Finnish fish filleting knife in a leather sheath


• 1 ratchet jar opener


• 1 wrench-like jar opener


• 1 metal strap jar opener


• 1 old kind of poultry shears


• 1 new kind of poultry shears – ergonomic!


• 8 pairs of scissors


• 5 tail pieces of a four foot long wooden snake puzzle


• 1 baster (with assorted attachments)


• 1 citrus reamer – the other three are in another drawer. Why do we have/need four citrus reamers? Don’t go there!


• 1 vegetable peeler – don’t know how that got in here!?


• 1 knife, the sole purpose of which is to score chestnuts


• 1 gold tassel


• 1 specialty shears to trim and crush the bottoms of flower stems


• 1 Japanese scissors for trimming Bonsai -- of which we have zero!


• 1 permanent marker


• 1 meat fork


• 1 souvenir coffee spoon my mother brought back from Russia 30 years ago


• 1 souvenir coffee spoon my mother brought back from Salzburg in 1964


• 1 appropriately tiny souvenir pickle fork my mother brought back from Liechtenstein in 1956


• 1 lemon-lime tea bag


• 1 silver salad servers


• 1 plastic champagne bottle opener


• 1 metal champagne bottle opener


• 1 gold plated champagne bottle opening tool


• 2 crumbers – you know, the things waiters use to scrape the crumbs off of table cloths before dessert


• 1 tin of Stick-Um Candle Adhesive


• 2 prong type cork removers


• 1 egg pricker (been looking for that for two years!)


• 1 screw on thing that holds the cartridge for a seltzer bottle


• 1 cribbage pin!


• 2 waiters’ corkscrews


• 1 silver spoon – not quite long enough for an iced tea spoon but too long for coffee or sugar – in other words, useless


• 1 extra screw for a Screwpull cork screw


• 1 old family recipe for a black walnut cake


• 1 Scripto butane “match”


• 5 packs of paper matches


• 4 boxes of wooden matches from various restaurants – the other 117 boxes are in the living room!


• 1 set of pumpkin carving tools


• 1 wire baskets designed to “organize” the drawer -- Ha!


• 1 wrench to tighten the bolts on a cedar roasting plank -- I had to think for a few minutes to figure this one out!


• 1 two cup insert for an espresso machine we threw out three years ago


• another champagne stopper


• 4 very large pot sized tea ball infusers – one with a Christmas tree on it so that it must have been meant for mulled cider – all but one virginal


• 1 suction cup used to unscrew the light bulbs in the range hood -- I knew it was in there somewhere, but couldn’t find it the last three times I looked


• 1 pack of popsicle sticks for some stupid gadget I bought last summer


• 1 plastic dog food can cover -- for a dog who won’t eat canned food!


• 1 sugar scoop --why this is not in the sugar, I do not know


• another church key


• yet another church key


• the plastic top of a broom handle


• 2 wine foil cutters


• 17 foil caps off the tops of wine bottles -- why would anybody throw those into a DRAWER instead of the trash? I don’t know, but I guess I did it!


• a glass thingie you put into boiling soups, stocks, etc. to keep them from boiling over – virginal!


• one lip balm


• one rubber ring to a Mason jar


• one rubber ring to a French canning jar


• a meat injector with extra needles


• 27 little plastic tie thingies that come on loaves of bread


• another fancy rosewood wine stopper


• 12 nails, six screws, twelve rubber bands… and,


• 54 wine corks! That’s FIFTY FOUR! Why? I mean two or three, maybe. Corks come in handy once in a while, but FIFTY FOUR! Why?

OK, that’s it for me. All of this fit (and may again) into one kitchen drawer, and not a great big one – only 3 ¼ inches deep and 19” X 16.” That’s 988 cubic inches or .57 cubic feet – not very big at all! Here it is:

Now show me yours.

If you want to have fun some evening, take your kitchen drawer. Yes, that one, THE kitchen drawer. Dump it on the kitchen table. Gather everyone around, and play “What is it?,” “Whose is it?,” “Where did it come from?,” and “Why is it here?” Beats watching golf.

Then send me your list.