two. ate.

Alright, it's late and I smell vaguely like lobster. Strange? Read on...

After the McFaddens left, I proceeded to take all of the cooked lobster shells and grind as many of them as I could into small bits along with two pounds of fresh creamery butter. What a freakin' mess. Ok, I knew how messy this was going to be but I never quite get used to the fact that the shells and butter get EVERYWHERE. After 20-30 minutes of grinding and smashing, we're ready to cook.

Except for the smashing and grinding of shells, lobster butter is pretty simple to make. After you have scooped the large mass of itsy-bitsy shell fragments and butter (which, by the way, looks suspiciously like salmon mousse...) out of the mixer bowl, you put them into a large oven-proof pot (so that the butter mixture fills the pot half-way or less) and gently heat until the butter is liquified. See, easy.

While the butter is melting, you heat your oven to 250 degrees. Once the butter is melted, you take the pot and put it into the oven for about a hour checking every once in a while to make sure the butter isn't browning (or burning).

After an hour, you take the pot out of the oven and pour enough hot water into the pot to bring the liquid level to 3/4 full. Then you let it cool for a while. What the water does is allow the shell fragments to float to the bottom of the pot and the butter to float on top of it. When it's cool enough to put in the fridge, do so. Chill until the butter is solid. When it's chilled, you should have a pot-sized hockey puck of butter that will be a deep orange-coral-red color.

Once the butter is solid, pry it out of the pan, blot off any excess water and put it into a saucepan to re-melt it. (You can discard the water and shells now...) Strain the melted butter through a piece of cheesecloth and put it back on the heat on the lowest setting to drive off some of the excess water. Strain it again to remove any other particulate matter and let it cool in the fridge.

I usually soften the finished butter and roll it into sliceable logs then freeze it. Since there is very little (if any) water in it, it freezes indefintely but it tastes so good you'll probably want to make another batch in a month or two. One caution though, the butter is very favorful and a little goes a long way...

Posted by wm. christman at 12:45 AM | Permalink

We had been meaning to invite the McFaddens over for a post-wedding celebration dinner so tonight we finally got it together. Ok, it was really also just a gigantic excuse to make a couple of pounds of lobster butter. More on that later.

About a year ago, I received a Saturday afternoon call from Tom. He said that he was making lobster butter and he was sad to inform us that we had to come over and help he and Carol eat the three gianormous lobsters that he had chillin' (heh) in the fridge. Needless to say, we did our grim duty and feasted. So we used the same excuse on Andy and Suszi...

I thought Andy also might like to know how to dispatch and split a lobster with ease so he could cook for his lovely and talented wife so I set up a little workshop. It all went well until it was Andy's turn to "do" the lobster. It seemed that the lobster had it's eye (er, tail actually) on his finger and when it came time to do the deed, it curled reflexively ('natch) and his thumb was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ouch. I should have fired the professor that taught the class...er, oh, that was me. No matter, one dinosaur band-aid later and the grilling and feasting went back on schedule!

Once split, the lobsters were cleaned of their digestive system(s), slathered with last year's batch of lobster butter and some parsley. The hot charcoal grill awaited the cloyingly tasty looking crustaceans and it was on!

The four of us managed to eat about five pounds of lobster without incident. We lingered, chatted, ate some more, unwrapped gifts and ate some more. Sated. Satisfied. Content.

To be continued...

Posted by wm. christman at 10:25 PM | Permalink

Yesterday was Tom's 2003 Summer Party. Along with the usual enormous amounts of food came another realization: the ratio of profiteroles per person needs to go WAY up.

Actually, Friday was the sausage making day and we pushed 10 pounds of pork-beef-italian-spiced sausage meat through Tom's sausage "horn" to make some nice, fat (as in plump) links. Those turned out very nicely after about 2 1/2 hours of smoking.

I'm not even going to try and describe everything that we made but will say that the "Five Ways To Sunday Spicy Ribs" were very innovative even if we filled everyone up with the first batch of smoked-rosemary ("Carol's") ribs. Those were delicious too. Someone asked me to describe the Five Ways flavorful beauties and I really couldn't remember the exact details so I said this:

1) The ribs were marinated in something hot.
2) The ribs were then dry-rubbed with...something hot.
3) The ribs were smoked over Tabasco barrel wood which used to contain...something hot
4) The ribs were mopped with...something hot (well, Tapatio hot sauce and water)
5) The ribs were accompanied with a very hot jalapeno sauce which looked one hell of a lot like pesto.

Were they unbearably spicy? Nope. The fifth way definitely put them in the brow-sweat category but you wouldn't believe richness of the overall flavor. Little zings of hotness darted in and out of the smoky, moist meat. Heh, it puts most porn to shame...

So...those profiteroles were gone in about three minutes. It looked like there were about 60-70 of them and one second they were there, the next second completely surrounded by hungry guests and the next second...gone. The rabid guests "found" the backup tray of the delictable treats and restocked the serving plate themselves. There were three sauces for them as well: vanilla, chocolate and carmel. I swear that when they profiteroles were gone that people were drinking little cupfulls of the sauces. Amazing.

Posted by wm. christman at 10:05 AM | Permalink