These moist and tasty crab cakes are served on a bed of lettuce with sliced tomatoes and then topped with a fresh made tangy lemon dressing. Monique picked out a few recipes and I was the assistant in making them last night, we still enjoy cooking together in the kitchen. And these crab cakes are very good, in fact Ben ate a double portion of four crab cakes. I know when Ben goes back for seconds it has to be good!

Over the years we have become fond of recipes by Weight Watchers® cookbooks, hand out recipe cards and booklets given out to members during their meetings. Monique became a lifetime member some years ago, and I will follow along with her when we both need to get back to healthier eating habits. Our cookbook collection includes about a dozen or so by Weight Watchers® and we have found just about everyone of the recipes that we have tried to be winners, both in taste and ease of preparation.

This recipe comes from the Weight Watchers® Annual Recipes for Success 2008 edition.¹ And this particular recipe is found on page 73 under the Fish & Shellfish category section. One of the features about each recipe is that they will list the WW® points value and also the per serving nutritional values typically including calories, fat, carbohydrates, protein, fiber, cholesterol and sodium among a few others too. So if you are tracking your points or calorie intake these make it much easier to follow on your meal plan.

Let’s face it, none of us are getting any younger, and as I age it seems that my waist line likes to keep up. So with that in mind, periodically I am going to start adding some of our favorite “healthier” recipes to the Cajun Chef Ryan blog as alternatives to our regular fare.

Points value: 6
Calories: 259 (51% from fat)
Fat: 14.8 g (sat 3.1 g)
Protein: 18.2 g
Carbs: 13.1 g
Fiber: 1.4 g
Chol: 102 mg
Iron: 1.2 mg
Sodium: 673 mg
Calcium: 124 mg

References

¹Weight Watchers® Annual Recipes for Success 2008. (2007) Oxmoor House, Inc. Birmingham, AL. p. 73.

One of my other passions is modern day and fallen flag North American railroads and in particular I have admired their heyday of dining service.  During the Golden Age of modern railroads their dining service was the highlight of travel across transcontinental rails. And in this vein I have added a Railroad Dining category to the CCR blog so that research and documentation of the dining heritage of railroads including their menus, recipes and service procedures are included.

I am a member of several online railroad forums and this new project is really an outgrowth of Elliot’s Trackside Diner a thread on the Model Railroader web site, and currently into it’s 8th incarnation. I post a somewhat daily virtual menu based on actual fallen flag railroads menu items and then after about a week or two of putting in embedded HTML table code the mods asked that I stop since it was tying up their site performance.  So I started posting the virtual menu on my own site and it got me to thinking and this is where it has taken me.

And now I would like to announce the christening of my Historical Marker for Railroad Dining history.

This is a recipe that has been a favorite around our house for years and only gets made once in a blue moon now because fresh crawfish tails are hard to find around these parts of the eastern seaboard. Frozen crawfish tails from China do not compare to the intense flavor and texture of Louisiana crawfish. So when Monique flew back from her trip to New Orleans earlier in the month she carefully packed into her check-in bag 4 pounds of the delicate crustacean tail meat. So we had the opportunity to make our favorite crawfish pasta dish which I named after her, Crawfish Monique.

This recipe is my version which closely approximates a similar crawfish dish known as Crawfish Monica® and sold from one of the food booths on the fairgrounds at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival every year, which is affectionately called “Jazz Fest” or “The Fest”. It is sold by the New Orleans Chapter of the American Culinary Federation (ACF-NO), and still makes up their major annual fund raising event for the organization and the local culinary apprenticeship program of Delgado Community College. A commercial version of the sauce can be bought by Kajun Kettle Foods, Inc. and is also the provider of the sauce for the annual sales at the Jazz Fest. Pete Hilzim is the owner and operator of Kajun Kettle and I worked with him on various projects during my early years as a chef in New Orleans. Specifically he recruited me to assist with local benefit dinners and concerts supporting the group New Orleans Artists Against Hunger and Homelessness (NOAAHH).

In 1984 I was in the middle of my second semester of the culinary apprenticeship program at Delgado and as part of our class credit we were required to work at least one day at “The Fest”. After convincing Chef Wolf at the Hyatt that I needed a few days off from the banquet kitchen I ended up working three days in a row from Friday to Sunday, (you got into the festival for free if you worked it) and having attended as a festival goer for many years this was my first time as an inside worker. I remember the ACF-NO president at the time was the Executive Chef of the New Orleans Hilton Riverside Hotel, his name escapes me, but I remember him telling me if I ever needed a job to call him, I think he is retired, and I have a secure job now.

The recipe below is based on what I was taught and how to make the famous dish from scratch. However, I must say that I have modified the recipe some, in the traditional recipe the chicken base and Parmesan cheese was not used, and instead of Cajun Spice Blend they used Paul Prudhomme’s Seafood Magic spice blend, which is a very good blend.

The Crawfish Monique recipe…

Making Wonton Soup was a lot of fun for Monique and I as we put it together. We found this recipe from the cookbook The Big Book Of One Pot which by the way is always a treat when you can get by with just messing up one pot for dinner! This day was not one of those days with having some other items too!

This recipe calls for both shrimp and pork for the Wonton filling as well as fresh ginger. The wonton’s are quite fun to fill and once the liquid portion of the soup is done and the wonton’s are filled and set up into triangles they only take about 5 to 10 minutes to cook in the chicken stock. This recipe serves 6 to 8 portions.