Midnight craving for crab cakes and home-made tartar sauce...NOT.

Yes, we realize our 2nd meet up is tomorrow in roughly 12 hours but we got the homework done just in time. Isn't that what really counts? Knowing we were working today at the Burlingame store, we knew we'd have to plan when we would make this dish. Tim (thank goodness he can get up early because God knows I can't) woke up early and took Alia with him to Whole Foods. $90 dollars later he came home with the goods. I inquired as to why so much $$ (I mean we could feed a young child in certain countries for a year on that kind of money). The culprit turned out to be the pound of fresh dungeness crab he purchased. "Fresh! But I told you to get canned!" Oh well, it wasn't my *ss that got out of bed that early so really can't complain here.

After dinner, relaxed on the couch, half falling asleep, we knew there was an elephant in the room. The elephant called "let's make home-made crab cakes and oh yea, while we're at it, mess up the otherwise clean kitchen, countertops, load up the sink w/ dirty dishes , and make the tartar sauce from scratch while we're at it." After many futile attempts, we finally got to wandering into the kitchen around 11-ish (pm).

Proud to report however, that as the chopping and dicing progressed to sauteing and forming balls of panko-crusted crab cakes, we found ourselves enjoying the newfound second wind. Led to some nice quality time together interacting vs. doing our usual separate activities (Tim in the living room on the Xbox) me in the office on the computer.

Now on to the dish as I'm sure you don't want to hear all the nitty gritty details of our marital life (or do you?).

The dish was easy and hard. Easy in that the steps involved were nothing new in terms of learning a new skill per se. But hard (or rather, annoying) because there were so many ingredients and so much chopping of "things." I admit I hate chopping but luckily Tim enjoys it so we work well in the kitchen in that regard.

We decided that we would make the sauce and form the cakes in panko (like Andrew and Yurah did--great idea guys) and then pan-fry Sun morning before our meeting. Therefore can't really comment on the taste, will update with another post. Wanted to get this one out before we meet to capture the "moment." Too bad it was just a virtual midnight snack. Did get hungry after we made the cakes, but luckily for us, leftovers from our dinner out saved us.

Tartar Sauce pre-mixed (who knew so much STUFF went into this??)

Tartar Sauce post-mixed

Sauteing the celery and onions

Crab Cake mixture about to be mixed into patties

Umm...too bad we have to wait until tomorrow.