the lobster butter
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...