Crab Cakes, Mandarin Marmalade & Flat Bread: San Francisco

Date:  jeudi 14 janvier 2010
Location:  Maison russe en SOMA
San Francisco, CA

San Franciscans LOVE to cook - and cooking on a school night is an especially fun treat when cooking with my resident Soma Russian chef friend.  

Tonight was just another casual evening - turned exquisite - with surprise recipes of tangerine marmalade jam made from homegrown backyard santa barbara tangerines.  Fantastic!  The recipe was simple:  equal parts water, tangerine slices (de-seeded), and sugar.  Boil and reduce to simmer until the concoction becomes a syrupy mixture.  Then, transfer into airtight container.  Et voila!  Ohhh the bright orange colors in the jar were marvelous!

For the main meal, we made homemade crabcakes - with only 3 ingredients:  1 large CRAB from whole foods, 2 eggs to keep the crab together, and finally, lighted breaded with bread crumbs.  Very easy to make, only high maintenance (haha) part is having to pick the meat out of the crab.  Luckily, Whole Foods does such a great job of cooking it and cracking it for you, that you can just take it home and eat it.  Honestly, I really did not want to help with the crab part, but how could I not?  Personally I detest eaters who do not help out in the prepping, and picking crab meat out of the shell, though not fun and a bit messy, is not rocket science.  Anyone can do it!  During the process, I did find it fun because I got to sneak a few pieces of whole, warm, fresh, tasty crab meat chunks into my mouth.  Yummyummmy!!!  The crabcakes tasted MARVELOUS.  The best crabcakes ever!  100% crab in these crabcakes, no filler whatsoever.  I appreciated and ate up every single bite down to the very last teeny tiny morsel. 

Then, the homemade flat bread was kneaded, and put into the oven one by one... I watched them rise so high in the oven that I was gleefully in joy!!  They were SOOooOOO CUTE!!!!!  Homemade anything is almost always better than outside, and fresh, hot, flat bread is definitely one of those items.  These flat breads are exactly similar to the ones made in Beirut, except ours were smaller in original size.  In Beirut, instead of cooking the flat breads inside an oven, they are cooked on a large rounded stove, sometimes over stones if it is super old fashioned.  Both ours and the kind in Beirut is torn up and served with a meal.  Who knew I would be transported back to the Medi this night?  COOL!

For dessert, we enjoyed hot flat bread fresh from the oven, melted brie, and tangerine marmalade.   Heaven!  I still dream about it everyday.  I wake up night and I think about the tangerine marmalade jam.  I think about it during the day, the sweet honied jam juices and the just slightly bitter tangerine peels!  And next week, I am bringing a large jam jar to my friends house to stake my claim on some homemade JAM!!!!!!  Soledad is passionate about fresh, homemade tangerine marmalade JAMMMM.