foodfluency.com

Before I blather on for a bit about planning a complete meal, I have to share tonight’s dinner. One of my favorite food memories is eating crab cakes three ways. I don’t recall exactly how each crab cake differed from the next, but, I remember it they did, and it was delightful. So, I’ve slowly been trying to recreate that.

Not all at once. That’s too time-consuming and crab is freaking expensive! But, a new kind every few weeks or so sounds good to me. It’s my summer thing.

About two weeks ago I made some baked cajun crab cakes. It’s a weight watchers recipe, so I’m not sure if that link will work if you aren’t a member. They were quite tasty, but I had a hard time getting them into cake shape. They just kept falling apart and breading them was a nightmare.

Tonight, I made mini corn bread crab cakes, from Cooking Light. Again, baked, and again, delicious. And this time they stuck together pretty well.

The big deal here is that now I have some Tabasco-like product in my pantry. *curse you mini corn crab cakes, for turning me into one of those people* lol. I have no idea what I’m going to do with this jar of hot sauce in the future. I’m not a fan, generally speaking. I actually picked this particular bottle of hot sauce because it was the prettiest, and I thought it should have at least that going for it.

Food Pairing

I paired this with a Tri-Colore Orzo recipe from that Everyday Italian show. My logic in doing so? They both use lemon.

Now that I seem to have some cooking basics down, one of my biggest challenges seems to be planning a complete meal. I really have no clue what I’m doing there. I can pair together meat and potatoes, but that’s about it.

Tell me, how do you plan a meal?

Do you stick with a certain cuisine? Do you go one complicated dish, and two simple? A protein, starch, and veggie? Do you mix up colors? Tell me your approach.

It’s a goal of mine to be able to plan a meal of complementary foods, but I don’t know where to begin.

*help*