Blue Crab Rangoon
At Ruse in St. Michaels, Md., chef Michael Correll uses two local and seasonal items — ramps and Chesapeake Bay blue crab — for this otherwise pretty traditional Chinese-American dish. He combines ricotta cheese and cream cheese with fresh ramp tops and pickled ramp bottoms along with lump blue crab meat and some fish sauce and wraps the mixture in wonton skins.
He makes a sweet-and-sour sauce with orange juice, sugar, red wine vinegar, garlic, ginger, jalapeño pepper, Szechuan peppercorn, coriander seed, cilantro, lime juice, dark soy sauce, fish sauce, water and cornstarch finished with Calabrian chile paste.
He fries the wontons and serves five of them per order with the sauce.
Price: $17