Flashback Friday

OK- so here it is. The crab salad edition of Flashback Friday. This is an infamous story in my family. When my dad dies (we hope not for a long, long, long, long time) this story will be part of his eulogy. We might even put a little clip art crab salad on his headstone.

February, 1996. Nathan had graduated from high school the year before and was living in an apartment while going to the U of A. My mom had to go to a weekend conference in Dallas, so Nick and I were left under the care of my dad. I was in 11th grade and Nick was in 8th grade.

At the time we didn't know just how big the crab salad incident would become, so we didn't think to take pictures of ourselves that weekend. I didn't know that 13 years later I would need one for my "blog" on the "internet" (since those things hadn't been invented yet).

This is a picture of us in June, 1996 in Colorado. It's the closest to that time that I could find.

It took us 20 minutes to climb up these cliffs and then my mom used the zoom lense so you have no idea just how high up we are.
Back to the crab salad. This is my dad at the scene of the crime.
So my mom is gone for the weekend. My dad is in charge of food preparation. This is a rare occurance. Once he retired and took over the dinner cooking he got, shall we say, better at meal implementation. But back in the mid-90's he was best known for serving Sloppy Joe's, which he calls Untidy Jose's.

Nick and I are hungy. We're growing teenagers who had an active day. My dad is upstairs making dinner and we're downstairs waiting for him to call us for dinner. The call finally comes.

"Kids- dinner! We're having crab salad. "

We run upstairs and find that my dad's version of "crab salad" for "dinner" is that he has

dumped a bag of limp and browning bagged salad into a bowl and topped it with a pile of imitation crabmeat.


This is the actual yellow tupperware bowl from the 80's that he chose to serve it in.

There were no tomatoes. No croutons. No onions or cucumber or mushrooms. No DRESSING!

No bread on the side. No pasta. No soup.

This is not dinner, we thought. This is some sort of cruel joke. Mom is going to pop out of the laundry room with a delicious lasagna any minute. It never happened. We were forced to eat the "crab salad".

We went to bed hungry like poor little orphans that had been given bowls half-full of gruel for dinner.

This is a picture of a delicious looking crab salad. This is not my dad's "crab salad".
In 2001 I made a cookbook for my dad for Father's Day. 101 crab salad recipes. He has never made one of them. He still insists that his "recipe" is still the best.

Sorry dad. You're not getting your dream job at Martha Stewart Living with that sort of cooking.