No, not the one above, which reminds me of the Partridge Family bus.

But I am finally getting a new rug (insert toupée joke here) which means breaking down EVERY damn bookcase and EVERY CD & DVD shelf and ALL my electronics and packing it all up in moving boxes for the carpet guys to move out of the way along with my furniture as they go along.

This is taking me DAYS to do, is a MAJOR pain in the ass, and thus my anemic blogging lately.

Well, I’m also working on another book, but you can’t see that until it’s done. It had been a while since I really got into the routine of writing a book as opposed to endlessly trying to sell the damn thing to someone, and I forgot how much fun it can be, as much as it can also be very mentally draining (and there’s not much left in my tub anyway).

I’ll be glad once the carpet is in & my house is put back together again. And then someday, perhaps I’ll get to see something like this in my house:

Awwwwww!

Almost as cute as me! (Though I might be furrier).

This week I read the excellent A Cure For Gravity, Joe Jackson’s memoir/autobiography of his life and career that leads up to the release of his first album Look Sharp in 1979. What makes the book especially notable (besides its good writing) is how the book is really about the meaning of music in Jackson’s life, and how he listens to it, composes it, and generally reacts to it. It’s as much a book about the place of music within the mind as much as it’s about Jackson’s education, upbringing and experiences playing in various bands before finding and developing his own ever-expanding eclectic styles of music composition and performance. Jackson’s tastes range from classical through jazz to ’70s-era British New Wave. Now while (like many others) my favorite material of Jackson’s comes from his first 2 albums, I also liked his later jazz/crooner influenced Night & Day, and his more recent regrouping of his original band, Volume 4.

To someone only glancing at Jackson’s career, it’s easy to say that he only followed the same path that his contemporary Elvis Costello did - starting out with energetic, often angry pop/rock, experimenting with jazzier styles and crooning, and then returning to his roots - but Jackson is actually more complex than that, and I think the parallels between him and Costello are merely the result of them coming out of the same foundry of British music at the same time. Unlike Costello, however, Jackson has classical training via the Royal Academy, and as much as I’d expect a book by Costello to be as insightful as to the meaning of music, reading Jackson’s book shows you how much of a musicologist and professor he really is, especially in the passages where he describes listening to various pieces by Beethoven, Stravinsky or Mahler and how he interprets them.

Jackson is an excellent writer, and has very definite opinions on various topics associated with music. He was never crazy about making videos for his songs, and elaborated on those thoughts very well in this piece back from the mid 1980s.

Much of my record collection is filled with Jackson and his British contemporaries of the 1970s - Graham Parker, Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Dave Edmunds, XTC and so on… all of whom seem to followed similar trajectories in the ways in which the amount of what I can only describe as urgency & aggression in the sound of their music mellowed over the years. Funny, I like a lot of the brand new material from Jackson, Parker & Costello, but Nick Lowe (always a favorite of mine) has lost me with his recent country/mellow/loungue type sound. Ah well.

I saw Jackson live at the small Rhode Island College auditorium way back in 1979 (I was barely out of my crib, really… ) when he was touring for Look Sharp and dropping in a few new tunes that would turn up on I’m The Man. It was a great show to be sure, and here’s a taste of it, a video someone made on that very tour at some other venue, with Jackson & the band performing an early version of “I’m The Man”

Notice how the song’s tempo is slower than on the album or on later live performances. The band was still learning it, I guess!

Good stuff.

The Los Angeles Times has been in free-fall for the past couple of years or so, with circulation and ad dollars plummeting. Every few weeks, it seems, more of the paper’s long-time writers have taken buy-outs, other jobs, or have been simply let go.

In such an atmosphere, I guess I can’t be too surprised by a scathing restaurant review like this one of Gladstone’s Malibu by Leslie Brenner. Maybe with the sword of Sam Zell hanging over her head, Brenner felt no fear in trashing one of LA’s more popular institutions, co-owned by Richard Riordan, former mayor and basically good-guy civic booster & institution-saver. Riordan also co-owns The Pantry, one of the city’s older restraurants (which is also over-rated and over-priced, but I thought the steak I had there was just fine… hmmm….) and he was the main force behind rebuilding the burnt-down-in-1986 central library, something for which the entire region should be eternally grateful (despite his bad & overpriced sea food, evidently).

Usually the material in the Times ranges from the predictable-mainstream-boring to boring-mainstream-predictable. One (of the many) reasons I cancelled my subscription was when I realized that there was nothing, NO specific news or commentary at all, that I was getting from the Times that I could not get from anywhere else. And even if there was once in a while (like the enjoyably nasty piece by Brenner I linked to, NEVER MIND THAT SHE NEVER EVEN SENT ME SO MUCH AS EVEN A THANK-YOU EMAIL FOR THE FREE BOOK I SENT HER) they put all their content on the web for free. Why pay?

And if you’re either going to get Sam Zell’s cost-saving axe OR impress him enough to keep your job by writing honestly & going against the usual okey-doke, either way freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.

I’m tempted to send Brenner a list of other restaurants I’ve found to be over-hyped and over-rated in this city for more pieces like this, but I’M SURE SHE WON’T ANSWER OR ACKNOWLEDGE THAT EITHER.

My own experiences at Gladstone’s (though I haven’t been there in many years) weren’t quite as bad as what she describes in the review, except for the damage it did to my wallet. Sounds like the food has gone from “adequate but overpriced” (the most common form of hoity-toity restaurant food in LA) to “crappy and overpriced.” Obviously, in a city as ethnically diverse as Los Angeles, the best food is to be found in small hole-in-the-wall mom ‘n’ pop ethnic dives of various nationalities, spread all over the “down market” neighborhoods that abound. Former Times food writer Jonathan Gold, now of the LA Weekly, frequents such establishments regularly, and compiled his positive reviews into an indispensable guide for those of us always on the lookout for something affordably exotic & delicious And I’m talking about food. Maybe I’ll write my OWN book on strippers. AND THEN I’LL SEND IT TO LESLIE BRENNER AND NOT GET ANY SORT OF RESPONSE AND…

Aah, forget it. The Good Lord punished her with an awful $500 seafood dinner. BWAHAHAHAHAAAA!

Hitchcock’s 1953 I Confess is the last of the never-seen-by-Wagstaff Hitchcock yardsale DVD bonanza of several months back, and I’m glad I saved it for last since it turned out to be one of the better ones, and a nice surprise.

This one is a slim & rather economical story of a priest (Montgomery Clift) who hears a confession of a murder and because he can never reveal the confession without violating the oath of the priesthood, he winds up the main suspect himself, thanks to some circumstantial evidence and a well-meaning but amazingly naive ex-girlfriend (Anne Baxter) who winds up outlining a possible motive when she tries to provide him an alibi.

Girls! Nuthin’ but trouble!

This one is also rather dark and serious - it’s shot largely in shadows and offers barely any comic relief or sarcasm (only a fellow priest with a noisy bicycle is there for any sense of levity) - we get a sense of film noir from the photography and a sense of stoic duty & Catholic guilt from Clift’s performance, one that comes off as stiff and unemotional, but is in fact very controlled and subtle. The only place where Clift’s dispassionate manner seems out of place is in Anne Baxter’s soft-focus memory of her romance with him - but if we’re seeing this through her rose-colored hindsight, perhaps he ought to merely be a passive participant in it all. He certainly behaves that way as the wrongly-accused Father Logan. Clift is at the mercy of the machinery of a criminal investigation, and the only action he can take to stop that machinery would involve breaking his vows - so, powerless, he must remain passive as the wheels turn and slowly crush him. Clift doesn’t say much in this film, and he’s required to convey thinking merely through facial expression at different points. One of the best sequences is when the true murderer (wonderfully played by O.E. Hasse) follows him through the rectory in a tracking shot, reminding him how he can never tell anyone of the confession and all Clift can do is bottle up his inner torture.

Also on hand is Karl Malden as a methodical cop and German actress Dolly Haas as the murderer’s wife, Alma (named after Hitchcock’s wife!). In real life, Haas was the wife of cartoonist Al Hirschfeld, and was the mother of the famous “Nina” whose name you can always find his caricatures. Aren’t movies neat?

Hitchcock gives us a lot of religious imagery in the film, but it’s not a religious movie in the DeMille sense. There are numerous shots juxtaposing Clift, while maintaining the sanctum of the confessional, with images of Jesus suffering - including one wonderful aerial shot from behind a rooftop statue of Christ carrying the cross while surrounded by the spears of Roman soldiers as we look down below to the street where we can see the lone black figure of Clift walking in emotional agony before he ultimately turns himself in to Malden. Hitchcock’s childhood experience in those Jesuit schools finds its way onto the screen here.

The only problem is how the film simply expects us to accept Clift’s devotion to his vows without ever giving him any moment to explain it to anyone (the natural choice being ex-girlfriend-who-still-loves-him Baxter). We’re merely told through her flashback that the war supposedly “changed him,” and we’re left to assume it was a religious epiphany that brought him to the priesthood rather than getting a Jake Barnes war injury that left him a limp noodle and led him to the Almighty in the pre-Viagra era. We are to take Father Logan’s devotion to the confessional over valuing his own life at face value, without any explicated depiction of how me might view this in relation to his soul as well as his life. There’s never any speech, any reflection, any moment of spoken introspection instead of the silent & implied moments of it. Perhaps Hitchcock didn’t want to go this route, fearing too religious a picture, but it would have developed Clift’s character much more and added to all the possibilities we could project onto his silent facial expressions while thinking over his ever-dire situation.

It’s too bad what happened to Clift and how he slowly destroyed himself. Like his method-actor contemporary James Dean, he only left us with a permanent image of his young Mr. Handsome self in his major roles by dying young (I get to say that since he was about my age when he died). We never got to see how his acting chops would have evolved had he aged, and either grew distinguished with gettin’ old the way John Forsythe or Cary Grant did, or if he let himself go in a totally different way, perhaps in the manner of other fellow method-actor Marlon Brando. Perhaps they could have made a film together were they fight to the death over the last piece of pizza. Or not.

Hitchcock remarked that this film turned out too serious for him. Perhaps a wittier tone scared the censors considering the religious setting and the main character of a priest - movie priests were very different in 1953 than now, when they can be more fully developed characters. The film is certainly dark and serious, but the people in it behave logically and it moves along quickly enough that we do not get bogged down in that seriousness. That is what elevates it into a better category of Hitchcock suspense from the similarly-themed Paradine Case. It also has a better payoff in the end, and makes better use of its exterior settings - Hitchcock filmed this in the old-world-style city of Quebec and we get to see a lot of it used well for atmosphere - dark cobblestone narrow streets, giant imposing cathedrals, high hills and steps, etc. So all in all, for what we film geeks consider to be the “B-tier” of Hitchcock film, I found this one to be pretty good.

Happy 4th of July!

Whenever I take my after-dinner walk through the Burbank hills (I need my exercise if I’m going to live forever!!!), I inevitably pass other neighborhood folks out strolling or dog walking. The cats I come across (and inevitably pet) are out there on their own. I’ve taken to carrying a shoelace in my pocket on my walks to cater to the more playful among them. Ingenious or pathetic? You make the call!

But I digress.

Most of the people I pass answer my smiley hellos with a “hi” which often betrays that English is a new language for them - they’re mostly immigrants who, from what I can discern from the conversations among themselves as they pass me, have come here from Armenia, Russia (or Russian speaking former Soviet republics like Belarus or the Ukraine, if the flags I spot hanging in a couple of houses I pass are any indication), Mexico or Korea. They all came here and have done well enough for themselves to live in a nice neighborhood where you can go for walks at night and even the coyotes wandering down from the hills to rummage through people’s garbage give you a Wile E. smile and trot along unthreateningly.

We always hear how people around the world complain about America and resent us for one reason or another, but those sentiments are far too often the voices of elites in power, whether in politics or the media. Bashing America is like a ticket into the club for them, it’s expected if not required. The ordinary common folk of those societies must feel differently about America if they keep coming here (often risking everything they have) and finding success when they couldn’t manage it at home.

And why is that success more possible here? Notice I didn’t say easier, because busting your ass is a big part of it, as is education, and there are no guarantees - the more work and education you have only improve your odds - but the odds over here are better than where they came from. Those odds might have narrowed since the days when my ancestors got the hell out of shtetls in Russia and got on the boat, but we’ve still got the edge. That’s why they come here, that’s why they stay, and it’s why their second, third and fourth generations will continue to do better, just like my family did.

Whenever I hear the Russian spoken by those passersby, my mind always drifts to my own ancestors, who got on a boat and came to the land of boundless opportunity and shelves piled high with stuff you need and crap you don’t but want anyway - and thank God that they got on that boat when they did.

I just finished reading a brief autobiography my retired physiology professor Uncle wrote up (yeah, there’s certainly an academic gene in the Wagstaff DNA), and he mentioned how my great-grandmother (who I am named after, btw) moved her family and my young grandfather to a tenement on Eldridge Street on New York’s lower east side (No wonder gramps was New York Giants fan), and by looking at this site dedicated to the history of that area, I got to see what temple they went to AND learned that Ira Gershwin & Eddie Cantor grew up on the same street! Coolsville!

But I bet they didn’t cook up & eat monkfish in white clam sauce over pasta one night, chicken tikka masala the next, followed by Hungarian chicken paprikash the next night, then szechuan tofu… all before their strolls through the neighborhood passing Russian speaking immigrants. I did, a testament to what’s possible in America and how those possibilities only grow and expand endlessly.

Here’s to a Happy 4th of July where we can all enjoy the blessings of our families’ chosen country!

My reply to a recent comment on my Paradine Case post got me a-websurfin’ and I came across this other blog with a treasure trove of links to the tapes of the Hitchcock/Truffaut conversations that comprise the book I highly recommend.

The rest of that blog has some wonderful movie-related material & photos as well!

Great stuff (even if you don’t understand Truffaut’s French!) … Happy Listening!

The other day I caught an episode of one of the better cooking shows out there, America’s Test Kitchen, where they did a couple of Indian-style dishes, and I did this slight variation on their Chicken Tikka Masala recipe and it came out pretty damn good.

Like they did on the show, I prepared a boneless chicken breast under the broiler while I mixed the sauce. I seasoned the chicken with coriander, cayenne, cumin & salt, and then dipped them in a plain yogurt/lemon juice/minced ginger/chopped garlic mix. I let it marinate for a half hour in the refrigerator, and then broiled it for 10-12 minutes a side, turning it once. The only difference with what they did on the show was that I let it sit AFTER the yogurt bath, since I figured that might tenderize it a bit more if it made any difference at all. Whatever…. it came out a little crispy on the outside and amazingly tender and juicy throughout. Yay!

While they were broiling, I prepared the sauce. First, I dry roasted a tablespoon of a good curry powder in a sauce pan and removed it. Then, I sauteed some finely chopped onion in some peanut oil until they were golden, added more minced ginger, garlic, a chopped up de-seeded Serrano chile, and then the toasted curry powder followed by a 1/2 tablespoon of garam masala. I mixed all that up to create a paste of sorts, added a heaping teaspoon of tomato paste, and then 2 heaping tablespoons of the plain yogurt. Once it was all mixed up, I slowly added a little water while stirring until I got the consistency I wanted.

I had left the broiled chicken to rest on a cutting board, then cut it into decent sized chunks, tossed it with the sauce & served it all with some white rice. It also occurred to me that adding less water to keep the masala sauce coating thicker would allow for serving the chicken in folded up naan bread soft tacos of sorts, perhaps topped with some chopped cucumber & tomato.

I realize that using yogurt and not cream & using peanut oil and not ghee takes away from the authenticity, but whatever it was I came up with, it was DAMN GOOD and that’s all that matters! Besides, according to most culinary expert types out there, this dish isn’t authentic Indian food anyway, but a British invention. That must be why it went so well with a Bass Pale Ale Pub Pour. Yum!

The other night TCM did me a favor and ran yet-another-unseen-by-Wagstaff Hitchcock, 1947’s The Paradine Case, featuring Gregory Peck as an English lawyer (!) who falls for his murder-suspect client and deals with the strain it puts on his marriage & his soul.

As with many of the other Hitchcock films that fall short of the standards we grown to expect (or feel entitled to, I guess - Good God, the man made so many great films, there HAVE to be some clunkers in there!), Hitchcock acknowledged the weaknesses of this one later on in interviews and (shades of Torn Curtain) blamed the casting and the fact that the movie had been forced upon him contractually. Paradine was the final movie Hitchcock made for Selznick, and filming the novel it was based on had been a Selzick obsession for more than ten years prior.

Selznick fought with Hitchcock a lot but most often got him what he wanted. If you want some entertaining stories of what a control-freak whack job Selznick could be coming off his grand slam success of Gone With The Wind, read some stories about the making of Duel In The Sun when you have the chance. It’s overly long and uneven, but it’s got some great over-the-top material in it that’s very entertaining. Too bad it cost so much money for its time that despite being a hit, it wound up being Selznick’s Waterloo.

But I digress.

While I can agree with Hitchcock that much of Paradine is miscast, I don’t agree with all of his particular complaints. Peck as a British lawyer could be acceptable, but Peck as someone whose passions are uncontrollably aroused by a suspected murderess is a stretch. Peck was always a stoic screen presence, and the roles that fit him well were those of stiffly controlled people (Duel In The Sun is actually a rare exception to this - perhaps Selznick saw something else in the guy). Peck’s other Hitchcock role in Spellbound works since he’s an amnesiac with no idea of his personality, so his emotions become under the control of repressed nerd Goddess Ingrid Bergman (another common female type to be found in Hitchcock films, whether it’s Barbara Bel Geddes in Vertigo, Joan Fontaine in Suspiscion, Pat Hitchcock in Strangers On A Train, etc. Just look for the tell-tale glasses!). It’s tough to buy Peck as someone who’d throw his well-ordered life away falling for an ice queen who has no feelings for him. This is where Jimmy Stewart might have worked better since he can do the self-destructive obsession bit better, whether in an Anthony Mann western or in Vertigo.

Instead of their wish of Greta Garbo for the murderess role, they had to settle for Selznick’s discovery Alida Valli. I can’t really blame her for the lifelessness of the material, however. Garbo would have made no difference here. And where I part ways with Hitchcock is over his complaints about Louis Jourdan in the key role of the murdered man’s valet. Hitchcock wanted someone swarthier and covered with dirt, basically, but Jourdan’s performance is quite good. He evokes repressed secrets and emotions well, and handles his inevitable breakdown and blow up very well. And since he looks like he just got back from his handsome lesson, he’s believable as a secret cough-up-your-scones Good Lord m’lady consorts with the servant class! lover in the DH Lawrence sense.

The plot and its unfolding are talky, slow and obvious. There’s not much suspense here, and all of the characters are a bit too stiff to really care about. I never found the movie involving, to be honest. The only bright spots were the wonderfully creepy Charles Laughton as an elitist old letch of a judge and Ethel Barrymore as his ignored good hearted wife. But since the crux of the plot rides on Peck’s love for his client and how it determines his clouded view of her innocence, it’s her character that needs a lot more development. Simply being shot in flattering light doesn’t make us understand why anyone would fall for her or willingly let themselves he destroyed by her. Maybe it was in the novel somewhere, maybe not. But it’s certainly not on the screen, and the way it all just lays there made me think that there ought to have been a crawl along the screen reading “Alfred Hitchcock’s Contractual Obligation Film” running every so often.

Ah well, on to hopefully better things in the DVD pile! Up to bat next, 1953’s never-seen-by-Wagstaff I Confess, followed by the next category of not-seen-by-Wagstaff-for-20-years-or-more, including Dial M For Murder, Rope, The 39 Steps & Frenzy.

Like I said, those DVD finds at yardsales have been a true Hitchapalooza…

Another of the Hitch films that somehow got under my radar all these years, The Trouble With Harry from 1955 gives us another example of Hitchcock-lite that usually only appeals to longtime fans and devotees of the guy’s work, so that must be why I wound up liking it.

Harry began as a short British novel, and though Hitchcock moves the setting to New England, the tone and manner of the entire thing plays like British black humor - very understated, droll, and elegantly fatalistic. It might have been more easily understood by American audiences if it had been set in England with an all-British accent cast and wound up getting lumped together with other Brit black humor comedies of its day like Kind Hearts & Coronets or The Ladykillers, but instead it didn’t do too well with American audiences used to & expecting the good old Hitch suspense, and had to make its money back with long runs in France and elsewhere.

Ah, but there was a reason for the New England setting - with a story concerning two pairs of romantically repressed people nervously opening up to each other in the omnipresence of a corpse that complicates things by needing to be buried and dug up repeatedly over the course of a day, Hitchcock gets to juxtapose the darkness of the situation and the darkness of death itself against a beautifully multicolored background of turning-leaves New England autumn. This way, we get the picturesque postcard views of small town New England (seeing this always makes me somewhat homesick for where I grew up - it’s easily the prettiest time of the year), yet we’re reminded that those colorful turning leaves actually illustrate a season’s end, a death.

It makes a lot of sense that Hitchcock picked this and Shadow Of A Doubt to be his favorites among his films when they’re both so similar in this regard - the dark secrets of an idyllic small town, people’s reactions to death ranging from the expected to the unexpected, along with the “What do you do with a corpse?” possibilities that repeatedly turn up in his films, whether it’s the speculations of Jimmy Stewart & Thelma Ritter in Rear Window or the ways in which murdered wives inevitably become basement flooring in far-too numerous episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

And then there are the manners. Oh, those manners! Emily Post could take lessons from these characters in delicate ways to deal with a decaying stiff. All that’s missing is advice from a serene Martha Stewart, but if you imagine Martha telling you the best way to dispose of a body, or perhaps how she put her monogram on a shiv back in prison before stabbing some tatooed lifer in the shower with the exact same cadences as she’d tell you how to arrange the embroidered napkins at grandma’s thanksgiving dinner, you’ll get an idea of how people talk to each other in this movie. The stereotype of Brits in movies, at least for us Americans, is usually people overly polite & repressing all of their obvious emotions to the point of embarrassing themselves miserably - all because of the societal expectations to avoid embarrassment at all costs - so where else but Puritan New England would this motif work for an American setting? Is this the reason for all the establishment shots of old New England white churches? Perhaps not - but it’s certainly helps explain the self-denial and whispering between the two would-be romantic couples in the film, both of whom grow closer together because of a dead body. We get love & death together a lot in this movie, along with reflections on the lengths some people go to avoid both due to fears and hesitations, despite their both being a part of life. The catalyst in getting the others to take those first few steps towards confronting both love & death is the Sam Marlowe artist character played by John Forsythe. Who better than an abstract artist to bring Shirley MacLaine back to the world of the loving after a failed marriage, or to egg on Mildred Natwick to get a make-over for her date with Edmund Gwenn? When Sam discovers Harry’s body in the woods and hears Gwenn’s mistaken confession, he places Harry’s death into the grand scheme of things, opining to Gwenn that even if Gwenn has indeed shot Harry by accident, who’s to say whether or not that’s in the grand scheme of things? We’ve all got to go sometime. So, on they go, being non-chalant about burying the body and merely moving on with things. Or, perhaps digging him up and moving on with things… or burying him again and…

Well, you get the idea.

It’s not a hysterical romp, to be sure. Other than a bit with Harry’s body in the house, most of the comedy come from subtle lines and unexpected reactions and will only bring a smile to your face as opposed to rolling in the aisles. It’s basically a 100 minute version of the sort of humor Hitchcock used in his intros to episodes of his television show, which not so coincidentally began airing while this movie was being made. I can sum up my review in the three words I said right after my screening of this ended: “That was cute.”

Thanks to the availability of pasteurized refrigerated canned real crabmeat, I’ve returned to using real crab in recipes versus the fake “krab” made from pollock (and sugar) that you can regularly find at any supermarket. I’ve found the fake stuff passable as generic seafood, but the real stuff is truly better, both in subtle flavors and (especially) in texture. I’m not enough of a connoisseur to really tell the taste difference between backfin, claw, lump, etc. versus the obvious texture differences, it’s all good to me, and nowhere near the difference I can discern between the tailmeat and clawmeat of a Maine lobster.

Evidently, the pasteurization/refrigerated canning process has been around for years, but only recently have I seen the stuff turning up at decent prices, both at Trader Joe’s and Costco (pretty much 8 or 9 bucks for a one pound can). It’s not as good as the real crab from the fish monger, I know, but for using in recipes where the stuff will be mixed with other ingredients and heated up, I really can’t tell much of a difference. (And to be honest, I made a simple cold crab salad plate with it as well, and I thought it was just fine.)

So, tonight I made some Crab Cakes with it.

For 4 decent sized cakes:

Mix the pound of crab with 1 cup of seasoned breadcrumbs, 1 beaten egg, 1/4 cup of mayonnaise, 1/2 teaspoon of worcestershire, 1/2 teaspoon of dried mustard, salt and pepper. Blend together into a binded batter of sorts, form into 4 equal sized cakes & refrigerate on a platter for about a half an hour. Then, fry in hot olive oil over medium heat a few minutes a side, until a nice dark brown on each side.

For a sauce, I mixed mayonnaise with hot sauce to taste along with a decent spash of lemon juice.

I served this along with a nice salad & a glass of pinot grigio for a light summer dinner. Well, half the recipe above - I’m not THAT much of a pig. I’ll have the other half pound of crab in a sandwich for lunch tomorrow.

We call that DISCIPLINE where I come from. How else do you think I lost 7 pounds in the past year despite the ever increasing gallonage of beer pouring down my eager gullet?

Of course, “discipline” can take on many different meanings…

RIP, Harvey.