Delicate food. Crab Salad.

I love the way food smells, tastes, feels and looks. Cookbooks with photos, cooking magazines, food blogs and the whole cooking thing itself makes me happy. These ancillary aspects of eating are not, apparently, rewarding for many of my nearest and dearest ones. The subtle beauty of all the various hues of greens on the yellow of a square enamel plate is lost on my sons. Diced mango mixed with crab is likely to cause my father to ask “what is this yellow stuff with the meat?” followed by “this green stuff isn’t cilantro is it?”. Faced with the above meal delivered to his office, Carl would be fervently hoping the next meal would have a lot more butter and something that sounds like “steak”. So, one of my personal pleasures is to cook this sort of thing for myself on Sunday evening when the kids are at their Dad’s and everyone else is fending for themselves. It feels so civilized! A quality, sadly lacking, in many of my days.
Crab Salad with warm tomatoes.
2 cans of Trader Joe’s crab
1/8c diced parsley
1/2c frozen mango chunks minced
3 pinches ground coriander
Juice of 1 lemon
1/8c minced red onion soaked for a minimum of 30min in rice vinegar, drained.
Salt and pepper
3 large fresh basil leaves minced
Mix well.
In a pan drizzle 1-3t olive oil and add halved cherry tomatoes (however many you would like to eat). Turn pan on to low and heat carefully so that nothing sizzles but the tomatoes are hot.
Make a nest of little greens. I used mache and microgreens from Trader Joes, but baby lettuces would be nice too.
Top the greens with the warm tomatoes and their juice and a few heaping spoonfuls of the crab mixture.