Well, we are officially in the midst of our Fall show season. This means allot of planning, allot of travel and allot of work by our entire team. For me it is the opportunity to show just how versatile our delicious crab meat can be. This year we kicked of the season in Houston, Texas. Now even though I live in New Jersey now, I did just happen to spend a large part of my childhood living in Texas and with my Mother’s entire family still living there I better know how to cook for a Texas audience. We usually try to show some variety in the dishes we choose to sample at these show to appeal to as broad of an audience as possible and to get everyone on the same page with our mantra of “it isn’t just for crab cakes!”. We usually try to have at least one hot dish and one cold dish to sample and I like to do one dish that is very left of center. We love to hear our customers say “ I never thought of doing that with crab”. We know everyone loves our tried and true “Craig’s Killer Crab Salad” named for our fearless sales leader, Mr. Craig Hospodor, but I had to break the news to him that I wanted to change it up for the season with the Houston show being the catalyst of change. We talked through the changes, replace the signature celery seed in the recipe with some smoky chipotle and cumin, add some roasted corn, black bean and fresh chopped cilantro and you go from “Craig’s Killer Crab Salad” to our new “Spicy Southwest Crab Salad”. Well that is one dish down now we need a great hot item to replace our standard “Maryland Style Hot Crab Dip” and I still have room to make something funky.
More to come,
Chef John
