Crab Cakes: the Miss Soft Crab Bakery Workshop (AM)

Miss Soft Crab is popping cherry's all over town this week. On Wednesday, we brought you the very first installment of Imaginary TV Show Workshop! which reader, TJ described as "some of the best crab work ever", even though it was in fact mostly written by people other than us.

Today, we are taking another Miss Soft Crab vessel on its maiden voyage. This one, which you may have guessed from the title, is called  Crab Cakes: the MSC Bakery workshop. FYI, if you're reading this before starting work, you should consider coming back at morning tea time. Seriously, I think you'll enjoy it much more. 


OK, i'm not going to over hype this guys. Basically, I wanted to bake something and eat it and then write about it here so I could feel like the baking and the eating are about more than just my desire for sweet treats. You see, I  try not to bake things unless I have a reason to, i.e. someone is coming over for dinner or it's someones birthday or something like that. But I guess all those occasions aren't enough to satisfy my needs, so I had to invent another occasion to bake for. Hey preston,  Crab Cakes: the Miss Soft Crab Bakery Workshop was born and happily, J's arm didn't need much twisting to get on board. Hooray! Shall we begin?

Ok, because I am a simple girl with simple pleasures, I thought we should begin Crab Cakes with one of the simplest pleasures going around: biscuits. Specifically the Melting Moment. 

For those of you who didn't grow up with the Australian Women's Weekly Beautiful Biscuits cookbook,  you may not be familiar with the Melting Moment. Readers: get familiar. It's basically a light buttery biscuit sandwiched together with lemony creamed butter. To the naked eye, it looks a little like a yo-yo but it is far superior. If, like me, you found the 1990s disappointing because biscuits that looked like Melting Moments but did not taste like Melting Moments because in fact that were a different biscuit were everywhere you looked,  then the Melting Moment is for you. 


Check out how easy they are to make. 


You cream 250g of butter with a third of a cup of icing sugar. Add one and a half cups of plain flour and half a cup of cornflour. Women's Weekly likes to pipe them in to fancy shapes, but like I said before, I am a simple girl with simple pleasures. I just make them in to biscuit shapes. 

You bake those babies for a mere 10 minutes on 190 degrees, then let them cool down a little. 

Then you sandwich them together with a combination of butter, icing sugar, lemon zest and lemon juice. 

Then you eat them with a cup of tea and have a wonderful time. 

I wanted it so bad I couldn't focus the camera properly. 

It couldn't be easier, right? And as someone who is forced to eat a lot of assorted cream biscuits at work, including Delta Creams, let me tell you, the Melting Moment is just so much better. In my opinion. Maybe you guys like Delta Creams, which of course is totally fine. It's just that for me, nothing beats the Melting Moment. 


Unless J bakes something more delicious. Lets come back at  afternoon tea time and find out, shall we?

Spanagnocchita

You know how some things seem like a really good idea when they are first presented to you and then when you look into the details you realise it isn’t as good an idea as you thought, but because the initial idea was so striking you can’t fight it and go ahead with it anyway?

Meet spanagnocchita. It is actually called baked gnocchi spanakopita with currants and pine nuts (or something). But you get the idea. You better believe when I saw this recipe I got pretty excited. I really love gnocchi. Those chewy little bastards! I wish there were some in my mouth right now! Also I love spanakopita. What a beautiful marriage this would be!

And then I read the recipe. Cook the gnocchs. Cook some silverbeet. Make a shit load of white sauce. Layer the gnocchi, silverbeet, pine nuts and currants in the white sauce. Bake. You may think that inspired by K’s cooking from the old Australia Woman's Weekly Best Ever Recipes that I pulled this recipe from the 80s. You would think that, what with all the white sauce and dried fruit, but I didn’t. It is from a fairly recent issue of delicious! Look, I don’t really like béchamel that much. I mean, I like it in a lasagna, surrounded by other things like tomatoey sauce. And I did eat it in a crepe with mushrooms and spinach just yesterday. But I guess the key is moderation. It could never be the hero of the dish for me. And yet the idea of gnocchi spana kept calling to me with its siren song. I kept telling myself it wouldn't work out. That with all that béchamel the spanakopita name didn't delong anywhere near this thing. But I just kept getting pulled back to the idea of it.

Guys, I wish this story had a happy ending. I mean, I didn't even put the currants in, but that fucking meal was... it was... It wasn't awful. Gnocchi and cheesy sauce and pine nuts and silverbeet... of course it wasn't terrible. The best thing I can say about it is now it is done and I can move on with my life.

Crusty Savory Veal Casserole: a hot delicious mess

Welcome back everybody! I am assuming you are all here because you want to know what it is like to cook and eat Crusty Savory Veal Casserole. If you're new here, you should probably read about why I decided to cook Crusty Savory Veal Casserole.

OK. Now we all know why we are here. Lets get down to business.

I am sure it will come as no surprise to anyone that Crusty Savory Veal Casserole consists of two main elements.
1. The crust
2. The veal casserole filling

Lets begin with the crust. This recipe does not just have a crust on top like you might expect from a shepherds pie, nor a pastry crust like you might expect from a regular pie. No. For the Crusty Savory Veal Casserole, the crust is made from sour cream, self raising flour and butter all mixed together and smeared all over the dish to look like this:
WTF, readers!
WTF?!
Sour cream, flour and butter, smeared all over the dish!
Can you believe it? Who the hell thought of this completely crazy idea?!
You don't even bake it first, you just slap the veal casserole right in there and bake it all together.
The mind boggles.
As for the casserole, it consists of veal, bacon, a can of mushrooms (!), an onion, green capsicum, carrot, celery and a can of tomatoes. No salt, or pepper, no stock, no garlic. The recipe requires us to brown the veal in butter (quite a lot, bien sur), then add everything else and simmer for a while.
Once the casserole filling is ready, it's time for the weird science to begin. The filling is placed in the dish with the sour cream, butter and flour goo then baked for about 40 minutes. With about 10 minutes to go, you take it out, and scatter a combination of crushed cornflakes and grated cheddar cheese over the top. That's right everybody: crushed cornflakes and grated cheddar.

It goes back in the oven for another 10 minutes and voila, Crusty Savory Veal Casserole:
Doesn't it look totally gross?! Look at all that oil pooling on top!
It's a hot mess, right? I scooped the oil off the top because it was really grossing me out, and then served up a plate for myself. It was time to eat this totally unappetising dish. I was far from optimistic.

Readers, I loved it.

It turns out that when baked, the crust puffs up to become like a delicious dumpling. It's really quite amazing how it does this while filled with all that sloppy filling, but it does! And despite being full of sour cream and butter, it tastes light and lovely! The casserole itself is so full of flavour and again, I was very surprised by this. It was basically this delicious rich and hearty thing and it worked so well with the crust. It was very very satisfying.
After eating it, I spent most of the evening thinking about what this could mean for the all the other Australian Women's Weekly recipes I have been laughing at for years. Maybe they are delicious too! I couldn't get the Crusty Savory Veal Casserole out of my head, and so ate it for breakfast the next day. It was still completely delicious!
I asked Midbro to serve himself a plate so I could get a second opinion. He sent me the following text message after eating it:
"Dinner was delicious dude, thanks!"
then this the following morning:
"Do you mind if I finish off the casserole, dude?"
No jokes, everyone loves Crusty Savory Veal Casserole.
Thanks, Australian Women's Weekly!

Why I decided to cook Crusty Savory Veal Casserole

"Veal, one of the tenderest of meats, is handy for the busy housewife and business woman; preparation is simple, cooking time is short."

So begins the veal chapter in the Best Recipes from the Weekly cookbook, published in a time before they included dates in publications, but I'm guessing around 1981.

I found this cookbook at Mum and Dad's house the other day and had a whale of a time looking through it. Boy oh boy have things changed since the 1980s. For example, food styling. The cover picture is the most tasteful of them all, the rest are nasty close-ups of glistening casseroles and crumbed fried things.
Ew.
Check out these tasty seafood pancakes:

Or this hot avocado with crab and cheese:



Disgusting!
Needless to say, the recipes themselves are slightly odd. They have few herbs and spices and very little seasoning. They seem either bland or gross due to masses of cream or masses of butter. Amusing commentary aside, this book did not inspire me to cook out of FOMOODT at all.

Nevertheless, I had a very enjoyable time flipping through it thinking How gross! and These people have no clue!. That is, until the guilt started to creep in. This is something that often happens if I am exposed to objects from the near past that have clearly gone out of style (read: if I spend too much time at my parents house or an op shop). I roll my eyes at how daggy everything is and then feel really guilty for being so dismissive of these objects simply because they are not to my taste. Perhaps the recipes in this book are delicious! I started to think. Perhaps they have hidden charms that my 21st century tastebuds can't imagine?

Obviously I would have to try one to find out, and because it would be so fun thing to talk about on Miss Soft Crab (we're having fun, right guys??). Some sort of casserole was the preferred option, because nothing says delicious 1980s cuisine like the casserole. Happily, 1981 was a good year for casserole recipes and I had many to choose from. I settled on the crusty savoury veal casserole because of its terrible, terrible name. And because I like what they have to say about veal.
Here it is in the bottom left of this picture. It's the one that looks like shepherds pie in front of the glazed turkey:

Originally, I planned to tell you all about how it went in this post, but have since decided that it really needs its own. That's why this post is called Why I decided to cook Crusty Savory Veal Casserole. See you tomorrow for a full description.