It's always tough to come up with the perfect holiday gift. Some folks are easy to buy for, some others are impossible. But I have found that even the most difficult people like food gifts. Everyone needs to eat! And one of the best food gifts a Marylander can give is...the gift of crab. Especially to friends from out-of-town.
Crab Country Gourmet, owned by Tom and John Knorr, will ship crab cakes, crab dip, and crab soup, all made fresh daily in Maryland, to anywhere in the contiguous 48 states. They recently shipped a box of all of the above to us to sample.
Our "dinner for 2" package, which included 2-5oz crab cakes, 10 ounces of crab dip, and 16 ounces of crab soup, arrived packed in dry ice, along with small containers of remoulade sauce and reheating instructions.
Half the crab dip, a classic creamy concoction of cheeses, crab, and seasonings, was scooped into an oven-proof ramekin and topped with a little bit of shredded cheddar before going into the oven. Pita chips were employed as the ramekin-to-mouth vehicle, and when we ran out of those, we used a spoon. Yummy stuff. It was pretty good cold, too, straight out of the package.
We used the remainder of the dip the next day, mixed with some shell pasta, to make a rich crab mac-and-cheese.
Crab Country Gourmet's tasty crab soup is a lighter version than what we're used to, with a mix of still-crisp vegetables and bacon in a tomato-based broth.
The crab cakes were baked for 10 minutes at 450°F, then put under the broiler for another minute, to get them nice and brown on top. The plump 5oz mounds were mostly meat, lightly seasoned, and with very little filler. We found them to be proper crab cakes, moist, yet firm, and full of crabby flavor. These are the same crab cakes you'll find served at the Red Roost in Whitehaven, MD, on Maryland's Eastern Shore.
The Knorr brothers also own Evolution Craft Brewery in Salisbury, and two other restaurants. They should offer a beer-delivery service, too, to wash down all this crabby goodness. ;)
If you'd like to send Crab Country Gourmet products to your kith and kin this holiday season, just head on over to their Web site:
http://crabcountrygourmet.com/. Use promo code bmore10 to get 10% off your order.
* Any products in this post that are mentioned by name may have been provided to Minxeats by the manufacturer. However, all opinions belong to Minxeats. Amazon links earn me $! Please buy!
Posted on Minxeats.com.
