While that might be quite pricey for some home cooking, think about how much crab salads go for in fancy restaurants? We would be paying at least $15 for the lunchtime equivalent of this salad in a Vegas restaurant, and when we can’t eat out like we used to, special lunches like this help me feel like I’m not totally constrained by life on a severe budget.

You can buy a pound of fresh lump crab meat at Costco for $15, which comes in really handy for recipes like this. The chunks are really big and tasty, and you don’t have to mess around with cooking the crab and then pulling all the meat out of the claws and body. The recipe also includes a pretty ingenious way to cook all of the thick asparagus that is cropping up at our farmers’ market by thinly slicing the stalks and lightly cooking them for salad greens.

Crab, Avocado, and Asparagus Salad
1 pound thick asparagus
7 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
6 medium basil leaves
1 small shallot, coarsely chopped
1/2 cup flat-leaf parsley leaves
Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper
1/4 cup salted roasted pistachios, coarsely chopped
1 pound jumbo lump crab meat
2 Hass avocados, diced
2 hard boiled eggs, diced

Cut off the asparagus tips and cut each tip in half lengthwise. Cut off the very woody end of the asparagus stalk and then use a peeler or mandoline to shave the spears lengthwise. Blanch the asparagus tips and shavings in a boiling pot of salted water until they are just heated through, around 10 seconds or so.

Quickly drain the asparagus and place it in a bowl of ice water to stop them from cooking. Once the asparagus is cool, remove it from the water and drain it well. You might have to use some paper towels to pat the asparagus dry so you don’t end up with a soggy salad.

Whiz up the olive oil, lemon juice, basil, shallot, and 1/4 cup of the parsley in a food processor. Taste the dressing and then season with salt and pepper.

Mix together the crab, asparagus, and hard boiled eggs in a large bowl. I tossed in around half of the dressing and let the salad topping sit for a few minutes for the flavours to marry.

Mix the asparagus with the pistachios and remaining parsley in a bowl and drizzle with a little bit of dressing. Place the salad on each plate and then top with the crab mixture for a special lunch.

These tacos are great, can be made in about 20 minutes, and there’s some scope for savings in the recipe as well. It calls for 12 ounces of mahi-mahi for two servings, but in our experience, about a half pound of fish for two people is plenty. Also, I like to use something other than mahi-mahi because it’s not always a great choice from a sustainability perspective, but more so because you can use some other — much cheaper whitefish — with little effect on the overall taste of the tacos. I generally just see what’s on sale and go from there. This week, we found some dover sole on sale and paid $2.25 for almost 3/4 of a pound.

The recipe calls for blackening spice, so anything in this realm will work. You could even just do salt, pepper, and some cayenne or ancho chile powder. We used NoMU Smoky Peri-Peri Rub, and it worked well with the light fish. The original recipe says to grill the fish, but I usually just do it in a pan on the stove. Grilling fish filets can be a real pain — perhaps that’s why it calls for 12 ounces of mahi-mahi, to account for the bit that will stick to the grill or fall through the grate!

This mango and avocado salsa is incredible, especially when mangoes are in season like they are right now. You could make extra and put it on top of any kind of fish, or even some pork or chicken.

I also decided to make use of the kohlrabi Alex had bought at the farmers’ market. Instead of just shredding the cabbage to put on the tacos, I made a slaw by shredding the cabbage, then cutting the kohlrabi into matchsticks, then adding some chopped red chiles (I used Fresno peppers, a good mix of heat and flavor), chopped cilantro, and then finishing with salt, pepper, red wine vinegar and olive oil. This got a lot better with time, so if you can make it in advance, you’ll be better off.

We also had some black beans with the tacos, simmered in a saucepan with some garlic, onion, red and green pepper, lots of cumin and some chipotle flakes. I usually just do a roundup of the vegetables hanging around the kitchen when I make the beans, tossing in whatever’s leftover or looks good. If you want to get really fancy, toss in a can of Ro-tel diced tomatoes and green chilies. From my view, the only requirements are garlic, cumin and some sort of heat (I like the smoky flavor from the chipotle flakes), anything else is up to you.

The tacos with the mango-avocado salsa are great, so if you can find those ingredients on the cheap sometime, this can be a great cheap recipe. The Spicy Fish Taco recipe makes 2 servings (of three tacos each) and by buying the dover sole, it cost us $3.11 per serving. Add in the beans and/or the slaw, and it’s really filling as well. The slaw made 4 servings at 96 cents per serving, and the black beans cost only 47 cents per serving. All told, this cost us $4.54 per serving for a complete meal, and we had plenty of beans leftover (they’re great on toast with a fried egg on top for breakfast), along with lots of corn tortillas. Which, of course, means huevos rancheros are in our near future…