This recipe was adapted from one I found here: Crab Cakes Recipe – MyRecipes.com

My brother is fortunate enough to have access to a boat and the ability to go in the Pacific Ocean outside of San Francisco to catch fresh Dungeness Crab. I’ve gone on trips with him on multiple times where we drive around, spotting his buoys, pulling up the traps via rope and tossing them back down. It can be tiresome, but it’s worth the work and much more rewarding than going to the store to buy crab out of a glass case.

I didn’t go with him on this recent trip, but he was gracious enough to give me a bunch.

My Ingredients:

• 6 cups (3lbs) – Dungeness Crab Meat
• 6 tbsp – Smart Balance Omega Plus – Mayonnaise
• 12 slices – Alvarado St. Bakery – Essential Flax Seed Bread
• 10 stalks or a bunch – Green Onion Finely Chopped
• 10 cloves – Garlic Peeled and Finely Chopped
• 3/4 cup – Dill weed Finely Chopped
• 2 stalks – Celery Finely Chopped
• 5 large Egg Whites
• 3 tbsp – Lemon Juice
• 2 tsp – Classic Yellow Mustard
• 1/2 cup – Parsley Finely Chopped

Obviously you aren’t going to have 3 pounds of crab meat most likely. So you might want to take the recipe I used and divide it by 3 and use 1 pound of crab meat and 1/3 of everything else.

If you have whole crabs, take the time and carefully pick out all of the meat from the shells. Take extra precautions to leave NO pieces of shell. This can really ruin the dining experience when you bite into the crab cake and get a chunk of shell. Here is a site that helps you with boiling and cleaning your crabs: http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Cook-and-Clean-a-Fresh-Dungeness-Crab/

1. Assemble all the crab meat in a bowl. I used two forks to go through the bowl pulling apart the hearty chunks of crab meat. This made the crab more stringy and crab cake like. Something to keep in mind, 1 cup of crab meat = 1/2 lb. I measured out my lump crab meat and had 6 cups packed. I then knew to triple whatever recipe I found that called for 1 lb of crab meat. This is simple math and might seem obvious to most people, but I think it’s good to point out stuff like this.
   

   Mise en place - "everything in place"

2. Preheat an oven to 400 degrees.
3. Lightly toast the flax bread and add it to a food processor and chop until the crumbs become course and you wind up with about 4.5 cups of bread crumbs. Add to the bowl of crab.
   

   Bread Crumbs Dumped Over Crab Meat

4. Finely chop up the celery, onions, parsley, garlic and add to the bowl with crab and bread.
5. Add egg whites and all the rest of the ingredients.
   

   It's All In There!!!

6. Mix it all thoroughly.
   

   Thoroughly Mixed Crab Cake Ingredients

7. Scoop out 1/2 cup of mixture and shape into a cake patty. I used a 1/2 cup measuring cup to get exactly 1/2 cup servings of crab cake. Then I pressed them down into a patty. (safety tip: remember there are egg whites in this, wash your hands well after you are done making patties)
   

   Making Patties!

8. When you have all the patties ready, spray some fat free cooking spray in a pan on medium-high heat and cook on both sides for 2-5 minutes, just to get a golden crisp.
   

   Pan Frying the Cakes

9. Then place cakes in the oven on a cookie sheet and bake for 15 to 20 minutes. We baked ours for a solid 20 minutes and they were a little more brown than I’d like to see, but they tasted great and were not burned at all, just not a light golden crisp that I wanted. Next time I’ll bake for 15. All ovens are different.

Out of the 3 lbs of crab meat we had, we were able to make 17 crab cakes. We cooked some up and put the rest in freezer bags and froze them. Now we can have crab cakes anytime, or give them away to friends!

My rough calculations for nutrional info on this recipe:

Serving Size = 1/2 cup

Calories per serving: 131, Fat per serving: 3g, Trans Fat: 0, Protein: 18g, Cholesterol: 48mg, Fiber: 2mg

I also whipped up a quick sauce to put on top of these. I didn’t really measure it, but it went something like this:

• 2 Dill Pickles
• 2 tbsp yellow mustard
• 1 tbsp lemon juice
• 1/4 cup fresh dill
• 2 tbsp mayo

Toss all that in the food processor and it was pretty good. Adjust to your liking.