Today I’m in Napa Valley, visiting wineries with members of our wine group.

A couple of weeks before we left on our trip, the eight of us in this group decided to have a dinner using recipes from some of the wineries we were planning to visit.

Marge brought the appetizer course using a recipe from the Chalk Hill Winery for Crab Cakes (see recipe below).

These crab cakes are held together by a mixture of fresh scallops and a little cream, making them easy to turn over when they are fried because they don’t fall apart. They are served with a wonderfully rich wine sauce that is flavored with Chardonnay wine, mushrooms, green onions and lots of cream. In fact, I’d better warn you to make only a half recipe of the sauce because we had way too much of it for the number of crab cakes this recipe makes.

Marge added some salad greens and added a stuffed mushroom to each appetizer plate.

Crab Cakes
Developed by Pacific Connections Catering, Santa Rosa, CA

1 lb. Dungeness crab meat
4 ounces scallops (sea or bay)
2 Tbsp. heavy cream
¼ cup finely diced celery
¼ cup finely diced green onions
¼ cup lemon juice
2 egg whites
Hot pepper sauce to taste
Semolina flour or all-purpose flour
Olive oil for frying

Squeeze out liquid form crab.
Place scallops in food processor; puree. Add cream; process until well blended.
In medium bowl, combine crab and scallop mixture.
Stir in celery, green onions, hot pepper sauce, lemon juice and eggs.
Form into patties and place in 13x9-inch baking pan. Sprinkle with flour. Roll over and coat other side of each crab cake with flour.
Heat olive oil in medium skillet over medium heat. Sauté crab cakes in olive oil until cooked.
16 crab cakes

Sauce
1 cup Chardonnay wine
5 fresh mushrooms
1 bunch green onions, finely chopped
3 cups heavy cream
¼ cup lemon juice
¼ cup apple juice

In medium saucepan over medium-high heat, cook wine, mushrooms, onions until half the volume remains. Add the cream, lemon juice and apple juice. Continue cooking over medium  heat about 20 minutes or until sauce has thickened.

Strain through a fine strainer into a medium bowl. Pour mixture into blender container and blend at high speed for about 30 seconds or until smooth. Spoon sauce over crab cakes.