"What I Cooked Today" Day 160

Today I cooked something quite strange. Jochem spent the evening with Eyal so I was left to my own devices and, BOY, I should NOT be left to my own devices! It all started with a bunch of left-over mushrooms. I figured that I'd better not waste them and might as well make something with those for dinner. While thinking of potential recipes, I suddenly remembered that there was another recipe that I'd been meaning to try in an older Jamie Magazine, but I couldn't remember what exactly. I looked it up and found a recipe for shrimp burgers. "That's what I'll make," is what I think. After spending a ridiculous amount of money on a huge piece of Parmesan cheese (which, you know, we really need and use a lot) I decided not to buy fresh shrimp but frozen shrimp from the Asian store downtown. At said Asian store downtown, however, I suddenly notice frozen crab, and I buy that instead. This is not the good kind of crab (although, according to my good friends at Top Chef, nothing good ever came from a freezer), but the kind that has been pushed into a rectangular shape and is awfully pink, but I figure, "I know how to make this taste good." At home I get to work and the thought that has been in the back of my mind all day and is painfully resurfacing itself at this exact moment, is the fact that I don't think that dry crab meat (or shrimp meat for that matter) + salt + pepper = something that makes hamburger-like shapes. As in: it won't stick together to make an actual burger. Fine, Jamie had to disappoint me at some point, but this is where my lack of actual culinary skills becomes apparent and without a Jochem around I decide to make it all go together with mayonaise. After adding said mayonaise and desperately trying to make burgers I realize: "This is not gonna work." I now have a cold crab salad. For a moment I consider to put this cold crab salad on my bread, but then I decide that "no, I don't want cold crab salad, I want warm food in between my two pieces of warm bread", and I decide to just stir-fry all the little pieces of cold crab meat (this is after I decided to pimp my crab with coconut and curry powder, but found out that the curry powder had fungi because of all the rain in France, and then used dille and cayenne instead). I added some Dijon mustard and more mayonaise to my bread, slid on some tomato and cheddar and made myself a weird sandwich which was actually quite good and filling. I didn't even finish the potato chips on the picture. The wine however, I did finish of course.

Source: Jamie Magazine Issue 10 June 2010