Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

We cooked lobster at Gastronomicom but I’d take crab cakes over a lobster dish any day. But cooking crabs? Not really a worry as such after cooking lobster (which I’d anyway done some years ago), but picking out all the meat? Still, it has to be tried. And, as Valréas has a great fishmonger, it has to be tried. I did try two weeks ago but (it’s a good fishmonger…) they sent me an SMS at 8am to say they hadn’t been offered any good ones. Today, though there were two waiting for me. Quite lively, too.

Also in the market were courgette flowers. (And Gariguette strawberries which, assiduous readers will doubtless remember, are the best and tastiest. These did not disappoint!) Having bought both I went back to the fishmongers to see if I could find prawns for a mousse filling for the flowers. As they didn’t have any suitable I had to settle for a chicken mousse filling for lunch as there were none in the supermarket either. (But there will be tomorrow and, as I didn’t mess up filling the courgette flowers, I have plans…).

I’m not going to show a picture of the bench after extracting the meat from the cooked crabs, It was, not very surprisingly, a mess. That’s doubtless why there is so much more to be found on cooking lobster—easier to cook but not, I’m convinced, tastier than crab. Sadly, the hot dressed crab recipe I went for wasn’t the most convincing. I only got 250g of meat from the two crabs rather than the 400g the recipe suggested you could get (I’m a novice, after all) but even after scaling the other ingredients down the crabness struggled to shine. Not a bad dinner, though, with watercress and after a potted shrimp starter.

But, I’ve cooked and prepared crab. And if you’ve licked your fingers after picking meat from a crab, fried chicken just can’t compete.

I guess it will be a while before I try making crab cakes. And sadly so as, in my experience, this is an offering in which US restaurants excel. Given current circumstances I fear it will be a while before I enjoy a good crab cake again. Tim Hayward, though, has recipes for lobster roll…