Crab cakes and the long chive.

The long chive? “What is he writing about now?” you say. There are four of us who know all about the long chive. When the girls were only knee-high to a herb patch, the Wife and I tried many things to get them to eat anything green. One of my more successful ruses was ‘the long chive’. If I asked them to eat scrambled eggs with chives, they would both refuse. The conversation every parent knows “Ugghhhhh, I hate chives.” “Have you ever tasted a chive?” “No, but I hate them.” would ensue. My answer; The long chive.

Scramble the eggs and chop the chives. Then ask one innocent child who should get the long chive. The rules being that the chive will bring good fortune to whoever finds it in their eggs. The result, everybody gets chives and somebody gets good fortune. So the long chive has become a family institution. Now with them in their twenties, they still insist on somebody getting the long chive, even suggesting who needs it most. So I really had no choice when I was preparing crab cakes with chives to advertise it as Crab Cakes and the Long Chive.

The ingredients bar the potato. Some of those chives are very long!

For this simple recipe, you will need:

• 300 grammes of mashed potato
• 200 grammes of crab meat
• A big handful of chives
• A teaspoon of paprika
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Juice of a lime

Chop all the chives bar one.

Remember to hold one back. You will need a long chive.

Mix the ingredients bar the lime together in a big bowl.

It’s best to do the mixing with a spoon. It saves getting very messy hands.

Mould the mixture into four or six crab cakes. Pop them on to a frying pan until cooked.

Next time, I’ll make them a bit smaller. Just so they will look nicer.

Squeeze the lime juice over them and serve with a nice salad.

Better serve this to the Wife. Being married to me, she needs all the luck she can get.

This is nice with either a beer or a glass of wine. We have been doing the long chive thing for nearly 20 years. Even us adults love to get it now and again.