Crab Cake Report: Eva Hit; Quarry Miss...

I had totally forgotten about some pictures I took of my wife trying out a new recipe for crab cakes she had seen while watching a segment on KENS-5 the weekend of Easter. Coming off of our trip from Florida and my yammering on and on about the Deviled Crabs, she saw this segment where a Chef from The Quarry Restaurant showed viewers how to make their special crab cakes.

Being good sports, we made up a shopping list and off we went to the HEB to get some crab and other stuff so we could whip up some crab cakes.Now keep in mind, we had no idea what we were doing, but it seemed pretty easy. You just mix in the ingredients, turn the mixture into patties (or cakes) and fry them up, right?But something crazy happened. The mixture was so runny that my wife came up with a conspiracy theory about the chef telling the viewers on TV the wrong directions so that they could never recreate his masterpiece, and they would be forced to go over to The Quarry and pay high dollar fro some real crab cakes. The recipe called for 2 cups of mayonnaise. Doesn't that sound like a lot of mayo for something that is supposed to be healthy?

So off to HEB I went to grab more cans of crab meat. And I might point out that crab meat is not cheap. I was thinking to myself that for what it was costing us to experiment with this recipe, we probably could go and pay the chef to whip up a few for us to try.

Anyway, with the consistency just about right, I made up a little ball of crab and put it in a pan of hot grease. Right away, my wife told me that A) there was too much oil in the pan, and 2) the oil was way to hot. I would show you a picture of the hard, blackened ball of burnt crab, but I was a little busy checking the status of our fire extinguisher. We decided that since we weren't going to be actually eating the crab cakes until the next day anyway, we would let the stuff sit overnight in the fridge and make them in the morning. This actually did the trick. When we made the crab cake patties, they stayed together, and this time, my wife manned the frying pan with a very small amount of oil to cook on.In the end, they were so incredibly good, I felt like the $20 or so I spent on cans of crab meat was well worth it. Honestly, they were simply awesome.

Okay, so why am I bringing up the crab cakes from three weeks ago now? I was reading the Express-News food section yesterday and I saw that Karen Haram did a review on the The Quarry Restaurant. For those people who don't want to read the entire review, they have a little column with the highlights. It lists things such as the prices, location, hours etc, and they also have a Hit and a Miss section. The crab cakes came out as a Miss. Ouch!

I promise you, Eva's crab cakes were a Hit, even if the chef tried to trick her on the recipe.