Lobster and Dungeness Crab Newburg crepes

A relative of mine just sent an email about how my cooking is always a "deluxe event." I think what I am trying to do with my cooking is make “deluxe” an everyday thing without it seeming too fussy.

However, the lobster and Dungeness crab Newburg crepes will not be an everyday thing. Aside from being complex and using way too many pans and bowls for one day, they are awesomely rich. Now, I made them a little more rich than the usual Newburg sauce recipe by going back to the original way of making the sauce a lovely pink – instead of paprika, I steeped lobster roe in melted butter and then sieved that through a tamis. A tamis looks a bit like a tambourine, with a fine mesh screen stretched across one side. You pour a mixture into it and then use a flexible pastry scraper to push whatever it is through the screen, making a very fine-textured puree. As lobster eggs are, well, fish eggs, they do have membranes associated with them so to get a nice buttery texture you really do have to get just the essence of them into the butter. The tamis worked quite well. Then you have to use that butter to make a cream sauce thickened with egg yolks. You whisk the butter and heavy cream together in a bowl over simmering water, then whisk a few tablespoons of that into egg yolks you have whisked (with yet another whisk) in (yet another) bowl to warm them, then whisk the egg yolk mixture back into the double-boiler set-up. Whisk constantly for about ten minutes while you strain to read the cookbook you left on the counter too far from the stovetop…because you have all the mess from making the crepes, and the crepes themselves still cooling on a rack on the counter, between you and that cookbook, as well as a cutting board with the lobster and crab you just diced up to go in the sauce when it is ready. And at the other counter you have your partner buttering a couple of little oblong casserole dishes to hold the crepes and sauce. Then he is cleaning the two nice big artichokes you’ve decided will go perfectly with the crepes. And he has never cleaned artichokes so you are directing him to get an oblong glass dish out so they can steam in the microwave oven as well as a cutting board to cut off the top inch or so of the artichokes and a bit off of the stem and, oh yeah, you tell him to get out a bowl as you reach with one hand down into the cupboard with the cider vinegar so he can make a bit of acidulated water to dip the cut edges of the ‘chokes in so they don’t brown…and he understands that he needs to put the ‘chokes stem up in the dish, and that if he is putting plastic wrap over them that they need to be completely covered. And you reach back into your brain to remember how long it takes big artichokes to cook in the microwave. And then the sauce is nicely thick and you concentrate on seasoning, ground white pepper (oops! just spilled some of that on the counter) and a couple of pinches of kosher salt, and is it good? You put a bit into Dave’s mouth to see if he agrees more salt, even though the seafood about to go in is salty. Then bowl of sauce over to counter, fold in the seafood, ooh that is good!, and see if you can roll it up into crepes gently draped into those buttered oval dishes – can’t just lay them out on a cutting mat because the filliing is pretty soft, and you’ll never be able to pick up the filled crepes and put them into the dishes without them splitting and falling apart. You silently thank yourself for realizing this before you try it and make a mess. You get the crepes filled a rolled with minimal hassle. Tell Dave to turn on the artichokes for another five minutes, please. Crepes into preheated oven. Crepes should be in there for less than 30 minutes so…whew!...you grab a glass of sparking cava (Spanish version of Champagne) and go in to watch some of the pretty dresses on the Oscar red carpet show. And are very glad that the lobster and crab were cooked and cleaned a few days before and that mess all cleaned up already. And that you know you’ll make a stab at cleaning up the mess after dinner, but Dave will shoo you out of the kitchen and take care of it.

Hmmm, I was only going to tell you about the right way to make the sauce pink. Those crepes were wonderful, by the way, and the artichokes were the right thing. Got the inspiration from "Two Cooks in One Kitchen" by Jinx and Jeff Morgan, Doubleday 1983.

Using preserved lemons

A bit of a hitch in the cooking plans this week. I got really sick so only liquids for a few days. So a hold on the whiskey crab bisque, which is finally cooking today and smells incredible. It has corn and coconut milk in it, a wonderful combination. Recipe comes from cooking class so I can't really republish here, but suffice to say it has bacon, crab stock, coconut milk, onions, garlic, corn (and I added corn cobs to the broth, too), whiskey (I'm using Maker's Mark), and of course crab meat. Since it is a bisque, it's smooth before you add the crab meat. I think Dave is going to love it even if I might not be able to eat any until tomorrow. Anyway, I made preserved lemons a couple of months ago. I love them just plain, I was kind of raised on salty/sour stuff so I like that (so did my mom, when she tasted them at Thanksgiving she just swooned). But traditional recipes only use the peel. And I hate to have waste. With this liquid diet thing, I've discovered two ways to use the salty juice: - in chicken broth. Just a teaspoon or two in a 14 oz can of low-salt broth really perks up the flavor. Add some rice and cook for a while and you have a nice gruel for the bed-ridden! - in low-sodium vegetable juice (V-8). That was icky to me until I put in a fair amount of the lemon juice. Makes me think that when I get to really "drink" again I will have to try this stuff in a bloody mary!

Soup again

I think it must have been the weather. After raining every day except one during the month, we got quite the snowstorm right after Thanksgiving. And now I'm in a soup frame of mind. It started quite naturally with wanting to use up leftovers. That meant the fresh potatoes, leeks, and fennel I had in the pantry went into a nice potato soup. Then I added some of the smoked cured turkey breast from the week before, kind of a smoked turkey chowder. That was really good. Some of that now in the freezer. Then we get to the turkey stock, the first version. First I had to cook down the carcass from T-giving dinner, and made consomme out of that. Because I had spiced the turkey, and some of the skin was in the pot, it has an interesting aroma. Very nice. I took some of that and steeped a prune in it, and served it with homemade preserved-lemon tortellini. This was a riff on the duck/peach consomme with the same tortellini that we had at a Gypsy dinner. We really enjoyed that. Dave wasn't expecting the preserved lemon, so his mouth was pleasantly surprised. And the prune essence was nicely floral. The rest of the consomme is in the freezer for later. Then the second version of turkey stock. This was was because of those 2 $4 turkeys I got (about 19 lbs each!) that I took apart last Monday to cure the legs and breasts for more smoked turkey. I roasted the carcass and the wings and tossed it all into the pot overnight. That stock got onions and celery, and got strained. Then I made vegetable noodle soup with that. Good option for Dave's lunch all next week. Tomorrow, since Dungeness Crab is in season, I'm getting a bunch of it and making a Whiskey Crab Bisque. We made it in class a couple of weeks ago and it was great. So I am looking forward to doing that again.