Crab Cocktail With the Guru of Good Life

I have been cooking a lot lately, and it's made me very popular this summer -- I'm averaging two or three dinner parties a week.

But as much as I absolutely love cooking, even I have begun to search for time-saving shortcuts.

There are two ways to approach cooking for people: One is to meticulously find your favorite recipes, learn them and serve them every time you entertain -- and just hope that your friends don't notice.

I have a friend who serves chicken marengo (a Napoleonic-era dish made with chicken pieces browned then slowly simmered with tomatoes, garlic, parsley, white wine and cognac, and served with fried eggs on the side) almost every time she entertains. But it's such a winner, nobody seems to mind.

The other strategy is too riff off what you come across at the market, which is what I usually do.

Ingredients inspire me as I look through the aisles of produce, meat and fish. Meal ideas start to pop into my head, which makes shopping fun. But there is a downside -- the risk that the new dish you dream up won't taste very good. That's where the tried-and-true strategy is stronger.

Since I have been cooking so much lately, my familiar tactic of turning to the market for inspiration and inventing new dishes every time I cook is becoming increasingly inconvenient.

So I must confess, I haven't been coming up with new dishes for every dinner party.

Instead, I cut myself some slack and came up with a compromise, repeating some dishes that are clear winners. But even though I'll use a tried-and-true recipe, I still add a current twist with a flexible ingredient list.

The first example that comes to mind is a crab cocktail.

I didn't even come up with the idea myself -- shhh -- it was from a friend who's a great cook. I look forward to his dinner parties like Seattleites look forward to a sunny day; he always manages to create menus that are simple yet deeply satisfying. We guests always eat in his kitchen while watching him cook -- his timing is flawless and the dishes come off the range perfectly done and just in time.

I realized that his success is due in part to the fact that he often serves a cold appetizer, which can be made in advance. And the last time I was there, he served a simple crab cocktail. Brilliant -- who doesn't love crab?

A week later, while shopping for a dinner party, a container of giant lump crabmeat caught my eye, and I thought, "It's OK, you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you cook. Serve the crab cocktail."

So I bought the crab and plagiarized my friend's dish unabashedly. Well, not entirely copied -- I did do some reinventing, and it turned out wonderfully.

I bought some Bibb lettuce, ketchup, mayonnaise and cayenne pepper (I was feeling really "old school" and had Russian dressing on the mind).

Then I thought about how sweet crabmeat is and realized that sweetness needed to be balanced with some salty and bitter flavors. So I grabbed a jar of cornichons and a bunch of radishes.

Finally, I spotted some fresh herbs and couldn't decide between parsley, dill, tarragon, basil and cilantro, so I bought all of them.

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