Picnic Day Market: Festive Crab

Our farmers market on Picnic Day is both crowded and empty.  While many of those in town for Picnic Day visit, vendors know that they are most likely to buy snacks and prepared foods rather than, say, kale.  Like the picnic in the park markets on Wednesdays, it is more about instant gratification than deferred.  As a consequence, some vendors were missing today and others had reduced wares.  But the determined cook still found much to buy.

 A lone Sherdo shopped today--and had to carry the haul.  I wandered around contemplating what I could get to make a welcome home feast for Sherdo #2.  I have the reverence for seafood of someone who grew up in the Midwest.  The seafood that reached us in my childhood was well-traveled, expensive, and, I now realize, a bit past its prime.  But it was often the centerpiece of celebratory meals.  My mother kept cans of lump crab and cocktail shrimp in her (always well-stocked) pantry, along with sardines and tuna.  One time when I was a teenager, I had to cobble together a late night meal for the two of us after we'd spent a day in a hospital waiting room.  My father had weathered a serious health crisis and Mom and I felt exhausted and starving.  I made a seafood salad from the cans in the pantry and few things have ever tasted so good.  In later years, I'd make seafood salads for Mom on special occasions, traveling long distances in Chicago to get crab, shrimp, and lobster that had traveled even farther to repose on ice at Burhop's fishmonger.  Which is all a long way of saying that the gorgeous, fresh fish and seafood available weekly at our farmers market continue to astonish me.  A weekly miracle.  At the market today, I realized that I could buy everything for a classic Crab Louis.  I usually go for the whole crab and clean and pick them myself.  Those are no longer available (this season) so I settled for E-Z (or lazy) crab and cooked shrimp.  I bought fresh eggs, the earliest of tomatoes (pale shadows of what they will be a few months from now but a promise of that later glory), baby lettuces, avocado and cucumber.

My version of Louis dressing is, like most of them, in the Russian dressing/Thousand Island family.  I combine about 3/4 cup mayonnaise with 1/4 cup ketchup or chili sauce or, since I have it, homemade tomato jam.  I add a squeeze of lemon juice, a canned chipotle chili, and a shot of Worcestershire sauce.  Since I have a horseradish root in the fridge, I grated a little in.  You can add pickles but I get that sweet/tartness from the tomato jam.

It's typical to add hard boiled eggs to a Louis salad.  I gild the lily, as I so frequently do, by deviling the eggs.  This makes the plate seem even more as if my mother might have served it to her lady friends in the 1960's.  To devil the eggs, I just pop out the yolks and mix them with a little dijon mustard, some mayo, and salt and pepper.  I top them with smoked paprika.  Deviled eggs may not seem sophisticated or trendy but most people will polish them off with unseemly haste if you produce a platter of them.  Please make a note of it, as directory assistance used to say.

In restaurants, you will often get just lettuce and seafood on a Louis plate.  But since I'm an inveterate lily gilder (see above), and a greedy market shopper, I add tomatoes (when I can), avocado, radishes (if I've got them, which I don't this time), and cucumbers.  Since I still have some of those pea shoots from last week, I threw them in with this week's baby lettuces.

At today's market, I also got all the ingredients for a roast chicken dinner later in the week, a stewing hen for making stock (on which more in another post), and a vegetarian dinner focusing on asparagus and mushrooms.    Not bad for a market geared more to tourists than cooks.