Crawfish Etoufee and Crab Cakes- Yens

We decided to have our neighbors, Elaine and Don, be our guinea pigs for the New Orleans test dishes. Since they were going to move away, we thought, "What the heck, if the food turns out bad, we won't have to see them again."

The night before, Andrew started on the crab cakes and I started on the tartar sauce. We bought the Wild Caught Lump Crab meat from Whole Foods. I am not sure what lump crab meat is; all I know is that it's different from claw meat. Anyway, we didn't veer from the recipe too much. The only things we changed were the saltines, where we used panko crumbs; and in the tartar sauce, we used cornichons instead of dill pickles. Andrew prepped the crab cakes and set the mixture in the refrigerator for the next day.

The next day, I started making the dessert. For this dinner, I decided to make a different New Orleans dessert: Banana Chocolate Bread Pudding. Here is the link to the recipe for the bread pudding: http://www.emerils.com/recipe/644/Banana-Chocolate-Bread-Pudding. It was super easy. You just need to dump all of the wet ingredients together and mix. Then have the bread soak in the wet ingredients with the banana and chocolate. Then bake. I didn't make any sauce for the bread pudding, mainly because of timing. I would have added a caramel sauce. However, in the end, the bread pudding was moist enough to not really warrant a sauce.

For the etoufee, we went for the crawfish meat which I purchased frozen from Whole Foods. From John's suggestion, we also did not put in the crawfish until the roux was reconstituted with the broth. In hindsight, I don't think that the crawfish would be as delicate as the shrimp would be so I don't think it would really matter when you put in the crawfish meat. It would probably hold up well at anytime. Since we had several boxes of chicken broth, we didn't buy extra fish stock. I think that since the crawfish was flavorful enough, there was no need for the added fish stock flavor.

Plating-wise, I laid the crab cakes on a bed of arugula which was tossed in a lemon vinegarette with some shavings of Parimgiano-Reggiano. The arugula added a nice lemon, peppery contrast to the crab meat. It was a nice compliment to the crab cakes.

For the etoufee, I just poured the etoufee over the rice. Nothing inventive. Agne's and Tim's presentation was definitely the way to go.

Wild Crab Meat

Crab Cake Mixture.


Cornichons.

Tartar Sauce.

Sauteing the vegetables.

Adding flour to the veggies.

Etouffe with crawfish.

Pan Frying the Crab Cakes

Crab Cake on a bed of arugula and Parmigiano shavings.

Unexciting presentation of the crawfish etoufee. However, the flavor was just the opposite!