Crab Cakes & Crab Cups.

There's nothing like Mr. Hawthorne's crab cakes. We'd been jonesin' for some crab meat, so we stopped at Billy's seafood and bought a dozen of the largest crabs I've ever seen. They yielded about 2 pounds of meat.

Here's the crab meat, minced celery, minced red bell pepper, minced onion, and Old Bay seasoning. Next, he adds in a beaten egg, some mayo, crumbled toasted whole wheat crumbs, and a bit of panko crumbs as filler. His general rule is 2/3 crab meat and 1/3 filler, not counting the egg and mayo.

He shapes them into little patties using a biscuit cutter. Then he chills them or semi-freezes before frying. These freeze very well for later use. If they're frozen, you can fry them very slowly and they'll do just fine.

Panko bread crumbs on outside. Unsalted butter and a bit of light olive oil.

Flip over when browned.

These are beautiful.

Mr. Hawthorne's 2 crab cakes in front, and the one in back from a local take out where you get 2 meals for the price of one on Monday's. I told him not to bother with the take out, since we'd already had a rather boring and lousy meal from them on another Monday, but he wanted to try again. He asked me what I wanted from the selection, and I said "nothing, since none of it looks the least bit appetizing to me." He went and got the crab cake and a fried fish fillet, lousy cole slaw, crappy mashed potatoes with too much garlic in them (As far as I'm concerned, any garlic in mashed potatoes is too much. I'm a mashed potato purist.), beets, and Caesar salad with the dressing in a PACKET. After eating, he said that was it. He'd given them two tries and wasn't up for a third.

Here's the offending crab cake from the take out. I don't really see much crab meat, but I do see a lot of filler. Didn't taste too good either. I don't think the crab meat was that fresh.

And here's Mr. Hawthorne's crab cake. What can I say? The man knows his crab cakes. We had two crab cakes that night and I used the rest of the meat to make crab cups.

Here's a mixture of crab meat, minced celery, minced red bell pepper, and diced, blanched asparagus from the garden.

I filled up Athens Phyllo Shells with the crab meat mixture. Here are the shells before cooking.

Then I added some Parmesan cheese on top and baked at 350 until the cheese was melted.

These were lovely little cups of crabby goodness.