This week on Cooking with Bwog, Bwog Chef brings you a recipe from her time whipping up grub for the paying public. It’s a crab salad with citrus vinaigrette, tortilla chips, black bean salsa and guacamole. Enjoy!

This recipe is a little more complicated than recipes usually posted in this column, but it shouldn’t be too difficult if you have a reasonable amount of kitchen supplies and some cash for buying ingredients. Recipe as printed serves four.

Dressing

1 small can mandarin orange slices

1 small grapefruit (or 1/2 of a large one)

canola oil

1/4 cup red wine vinegar

2 green onions (the long skinny ones), cut small

a few pepper flakes

Pour the mandarin orange slices with their juice into a bowl. Peel the grapefruit and supreme it (that’s when you cut away all the skin so it’s just sections made of pulp) and add it to the oranges. Add the vinegar, onions and pepper flakes and toss. Then add the canola oil while stirring to combine. The oil will probably separate out, so just make sure that you get oil and citrus vinegar on the salad when you toss it later.

Black Bean Salsa

2 cups of black beans (1 can or 1 cup dry), rinsed in cold water

1 green and 1 red bell pepper, diced small

1 small red onion, diced. If you don’t like onion raw very much, soak it in water for a while to soften the flavor

2 limes

salt

Combine the beans, diced peppers and diced onion. Cut open the limes and squeeze the juice onto the mixture. Salt to taste (I use quite a bit of salt).

Tortilla Chips

You can just buy some if you’re lazy

1 pack of corn tortillas – multiple colors is nice

cumin

salt

oil

Preheat the oven to 400. In the restaurant we deep fried them, but you can get a nice effect by baking them, too. Cut the tortillas into the shape you want – I usually do triangles. Oil a cookie sheet and lay the tortilla slices out in one layer. Then sprinkle oil on top, or if you have a brush, brush the tops with oil. Back until they are crispy (10-15 minutes). When you remove them, put them in a bowl lined with paper towels and sprinkle cumin and salt on them to taste.

Guacamole

Everyone has her own way of making guac. This was how I made it at the restaurant.

2 avocados (or alternatively, you can buy packs of avocado puree at some stores)

cumin

2 cloves garlic, minced

pepper flakes or chili powder (just a dab!)

1 tomato. Cut it open and remove the seeds, then dice.

optional: 1 cup sour cream

1 lemon or lime (whichever you prefer), juice. 

 UPDATE: Cilantro. Just buy several sprigs of it, tear the leaves off and roll them up before mincing.

Combine all ingredients in a bowl and mash with a fork until thoroughly mixed. Squeeze citrus juice over the top before storing to keep it from turning brown.

Final Salad

Romaine lettuce (2-3 heads)

A bit of diced tomato for garnish

Crab (canned works, or buy it fresh. I would say about 1/4 cup per person)

Limes

Note: you’ll probably have to do one plate at a time. These instructions are written out for plating one serving.

Cut up lettuce (amount for one person, 2-3 handfuls) and toss in bowl with the citrus dressing. Take out a big plate and put around 1/2 cup of guacamole on one side and 1/2 cup of bean salsa on the other. Then put the tossed salad in the middle, and place the crab on top of the lettuce. Put a good sized handful of tortilla chips on the side and stick a few into the guacamole (this looks really cool if you’ve made long, skinny tortilla chips). Garnish with diced tomato and 1 or 2 slices of lime. Serve immediately (crab goes bad really really fast).