Pride of Baltimore Crab Cakes with Fennel and Blood Orange Salad

Sunday 24 February

We made a new type of crab cake as a departure from our usual, following this recipe - though we were not impressed, we have to admit.

The fault may have been in using butter crackers (sort of like Ritz), the only ones we had around, instead of plain Saltine-style soda crackers. But we tend to put the blame on the egg, which made the crabcakes too heavy and soggy. Barbara even felt the need to run up some emergency tartar sauce. So, we're going back to the traditions of our ancestors (all right, half of our ancestors considered crab an abomination, and the other half couldn't afford it).

On the side was a lovely salad of fennel run through the benriner. We put them in water in the fridge to crisp up, which really seemed to perk them up even more, then topped with thin slices of blood oranges, and dressed with just a little oil and rice wine vinegar.