how to eat like a bird: a hot crab dip

This was my first real test of portion control after a couple weeks of a restrictive diet emphasizing fruits and vegetables. My stomach had shrunk but would I allow it to expand for the sake of a gooey baked dish you can dip into? Foods that require dipping seem to be my weakness.

Relatively speaking, this simple crab dip recipe from CHOW contains less fattening ingredients than most baked crab dips. There's 6 tablespoons of mayonnaise and a tablespoon of horseradish cream per pound of crab, plus the cornbread topping (an inspired choice which brings out the sweetness of the crab). But it's not one of those concoctions that have you mixing mayo, sour cream, and cream cheese all together to be baked under a layer of shredded cheese. Who can taste the crab after all that?

I used backfin crab meat from a can, rather than jumbo lump, as I think that's perfectly adequate for dips. But, of course, jumbo lump would have been better, and this dip was a little too wet for the smaller pieces of backfin. I would say you can cut it back by one or two tablespoons of mayonnaise. For the cornbread, I stopped by a Southern restaurant and picked up two pieces. You can also use cornbread muffins from a supermarket.

I served this with endive leaves as well as rounds of baguette toasted in butter. I did a comparison taste test and, of course, the bread won. But later when I snacked on leftovers by myself, I found that I was too lazy to slice and toast up day-old bread, and the endive leaves were ever so convenient, like disposable plates with nary a crumb left behind. I can't imagine loading them up with something like onion dip (which everyone knows needs potato chips, not crudité), but they worked really well with the crab dip.

And while bread seems the more substantive food item by sight, endive is much more filling because it's a little fibrous. I do think that starting off with one or two leaves delicately piled on with dip made me eat a lot less of it even when I switched to the bread.