Stay at Stove Dad

Go Giants! Game-Day Frikadeller Recipe

When I wrote earlier that I didn’t know where the time went last weekend, I wasn’t telling the whole story. A good part of it was spent watching the Giants overcome the Packers. And a good rest of the part of it was spent getting ready to watch the game.

This was a rare occasion. In my circle, I don’t have many football-watching friends (well, that’s not entirely true: one friend has repeatedly invited me to Giants Stadium to share his home-field tickets, but I’ve never gone). Last weekend, though, while in Lake Placid, I discovered that my friend E., as I’ll call her here, was my kind of football fan. She liked the game when it was playoff time. I don’t have the patience for regular season games (note to self: ask shrink about that), but when the end of the season is on the line, I’m there.

So we set out to tune into the Giants, but missed their triumph over the Atlanta Falcons because we were watching bobsledding practice (there are some things you can do in Lake Placid that you just can’t do anywhere else, at least not on the East Coast). Having failed to catch the Giants victory, we settled for the first half of the Broncos-Steelers contest. Clearly, our football-watching skills needed work, because the second half of that game was by far one of the most exciting finishes in playoff history (or so I subsequently read).

Still, we had fun, eating popcorn and guacamole and drinking beer. So, excited by the Giants’ excellent playing of late, I invited my friends back over for the most recent game, and I whipped up a batch of Frikadeller (Danish meatballs).

Football and Danish meatballs are not exactly a natural combination, but let me tell you, they are a great one. I was able to make the meatballs ahead of time, and keep them warm in the oven. This meant I was sipping a Corona on the couch while the game was on, and not standing in the kitchen.

I had never heard of Frikadeller before last year. I first came across them in Laurie David’s excellent book, “The Family Dinner.” The recipe comes from David’s personal chef, Kirstin Uhrenholdt; it was her grandmother’s. There are many nice things about them—kids love them, they’re easy to make, and they’re delicious being the top three. My friends and their son and my family gobbled them up—at half time, of course.

Game-Day Frikadeller

 

• 2/3 cup cold water
• ½ cup homemade, unseasoned breadcrumbs (or a little more, depending on how things go, how many visitors you have coming over)
• 2 eggs, slightly beaten
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon pepper
• 1 tablespoon apple-cider vinegar (or white wine, if that’s all you have)
• ¼ cup chopped fresh parsley
• 1 small onion, minced
• 2 lbs ground turkey

 

In a large bowl, combine all the ingredients except the turkey. Stir well until mixed together. Let the mixture rest in the refrigerator for about ten minutes, until the breadcrumbs absorb the liquid

Add the ground turkey to the bowl and mix well

Heat oven to 350 degrees.

Oil a baking sheet and set it nearby.

Heat a large frying pan with some oil for frying.

Using a spoon and/or your hands, make small balls out of the mixture and place the mixture in the frying pan. Flatten the balls so the are no longer round, and are more oblong than circular.

Fry on one side until brown, and then flip.

When brown on both sides (more or less), remove the meatballs from the frying pan and slide them on the baking sheet.

Repeat until all the mixture is used up and you have a baking sheet full of meatballs.

Bake the meatballs in the oven for 20 minutes.

 

Serve with a hearty bread or some other starch (I made a variation on fried rice) and a vegetable (I made a salad).

Sufficient for 4 adults and 3 children easily. Also good the next day.

 

Olympic Rabbit Stew Recipe

As I mentioned earlier, I cooked up a delicious rabbit stew while on vacation recently in Lake Placid. Just this weekend, after I returned, I had a chance (call it twenty-minutes—where does the time go with a family???) to throw together the above drawing, because, as I also mentioned, the stew was so good the night I made it, that I forgot to photograph it.

I was inspired to make the stew after reading the recipe in the New York Times. It’s by David Tanis, and I saw it in his great column, “City Kitchen.” The headline is for a braised rabbit stew, so when I was packing to go away, I threw my trusty Le Creuset  cast-iron casserole in the trunk of the car, before heading north.

On my way out of town, I didn’t bother to read the driving directions my friend had sent me, and I became flummoxed upon exiting the George Washington Bridge. I had Googled the route, though, and I took an educated guess. Route 4, to Route 17, turned out to be a fine way to go, and I was reminded of this misadventure when I finally took out the newspaper clipping and read the recipe through fully in Lake Placid.

Tanis’s column didn’t mention anything about using a casserole, but damned if I had lugged that heavy iron pot three hundred miles for naught. I was going to use it, recipe or no recipe.

I also didn’t have porcini mushrooms. And I didn’t have chicken stock. So I used vegetable stock, and snuck in an anchovy or two to boost the flavor. Tanis had written that the proportions of the recipe “are forgiving and not etched in stone,” so I figured the ingredients might be forgiving, too. And sure enough, the dish was delicious.

His recipe calls for cooking the rabbit for about an hour in the oven. I was doing it on the stovetop, so I had to guess when it would be done. The nice thing about a braise, is that it is very forgiving. As it turned out the night I served it, everyone needed to get their children into bed before eating, so it sat on the stove for well more than an hour. The meat was falling off the bone by the time we ate it, and there was nothing left when we were done. I served it over couscous.

Olympic Rabbit Stew

 

• 1 whole rabbit (2 1/2 to 3 pounds)
• Olive oil
• Salt and pepper
• Flour, for dusting
• 1 onion, finely diced
• 2 cups leeks, finely diced
• 2 anchovies
• 6 garlic cloves, minced
• 2 tablespoons rosemary, roughly chopped
• 8 ounces cremini or portobello mushrooms, thickly sliced
• Pinch of red pepper flakes
• One 28 oz can of tomatoes, chopped
• 1/2 cup dry white wine
• 1 cup unsalted chicken broth (or vegetable stock).

 

Cut the rabbit into 9 pieces (or ask your butcher to) as follows: with a sharp cleaver, cut the saddle (center portion) into 3 pieces, leaving the kidneys attached. Cut the front portion (front legs) in half through the backbone. Chop each hind leg into 2 pieces.

Heat 1/4 inch of olive oil in a Dutch oven. Season the rabbit pieces with salt and pepper, then dust lightly with flour. Lightly brown the rabbit for about 3 minutes on both sides, working in batches. Set aside

Pour off the used oil, wipe out the pan and add 2 tablespoons fresh oil. Heat to medium-high, add the onions and the anchovies and cook till soft, about 5 minutes. Add the leek, garlic, rosemary and mushrooms. Season generously with salt and pepper, and add red pepper flakes to taste. Cook for 2 minutes more, stirring.

Add the chopped tomatoes and wine, and let the mixture reduce for 1 minute. Add the broth, bring to a simmer, taste and adjust seasonings.

Return the rabbit to the dish. Cover the dish, and simmer for about 1 hour. Let rest 10 minutes before serving.

Yield: 4 servings.

 

Salmon Fried Rice with Broccoli

One of my go-to meals around the house is a simple combination of salmon, rice, and broccoli. It’s a go-to meal for me, but Santa Maria tends to think of it as a go-away meal—she doesn’t like it.  She can’t argue with it though, because it’s perfectly healthy, and if one is hungry enough, perfectly tasty.

Still, I see her point, and for months, if not years, I’ve been trying to figure out a way to make the salmon taste better. I tried making sauces with ginger and rice wine, ginger and red wine, ginger and soy sauce, garlic and rice wine, garlic and red wine, garlic and soy sauce. Nothing ever worked, and more often than not I would have to throw the sauce in the garbage and give up.

Tonight, though, I nailed it. I was home late from work, and Santa Maria had already cooked a piece of salmon and steamed some broccoli. That morning, I had made a pot of rice, so that was ready, too.

I wasn’t really in the mood for cold salmon, cold broccoli, and cold rice, and I cast aside my past experiences, didn’t consider the failures that had graced the frying pan recently, and started thinking.

Fried rice with ginger and garlic came to mind. A chili pepper would be a nice touch. And a bit of egg could bind things together. The broccoli and the salmon, broken into pieces, would warm in the pan with the rice. As I cooked, it looked and smelled promising. I finished the dish with a splash of white-wine vinegar, and I knew I was on to something. It tasted just great, and I’m sure I’ll be making it again soon.

 

Fried Rice with Salmon and Broccoli

• A few florets of broccoli, steamed
• A quarter of half pound fillet of salmon, pan fried or steamed until cooked, crumbled into small pieces
• 1 or 2 garlic cloves, minced
• A piece of ginger, about a half-inch long, peeled and minced
• 1 chili pepper
• A cup or so of rice, already cooked
• An egg, slightly beaten
• Canola, or other vegetable oil
• White wine vinegar

In a large frying pan on high heat, sauté the minced garlic and ginger for a few minutes in the canola oil, until it is fragrant.

Add the rice and keep stirring with a spatula

Add the salmon and the broccoli

Add the egg, and keep stirring

Keep it on the heat until the egg is cooked

Finish with a splash of white-wine vinegar

Stone Soup or Never Ending Lamb Stew?

Last weekend, Nina, Pinta, and  Santa Maria and I had my brother, his wife, and their two-year-old son over for Sunday supper, a move that allowed me to meet two goals. The first is to spend more high-quality time with my siblings and friends. The second is to spend less money on lunch, by bringing a meal to work each day.

Lunch used to be easy for me. I’m fortunate to have a nice cafeteria at my office, but lately, perhaps because of this nation's absurd drive to produce ethanol (which pushes up the cost of corn and feed for livestock), or perhaps its because of the rise in oil prices (which makes it more expensive to transport the food), the cafeteria has been charging more, and the quality has slipped. I realized that I was routinely spending more than $10 a day to have lunch, and I wasn’t exactly happy with what I was eating. So I decided I’d bring my food, instead of buying it.

But making breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the wife and kids is already a bit overwhelming, so I was flummoxed about how to add another meal to the mix for myself. The only thing I could think to do is what has always worked for me—just cook more food at home.

One week I roasted two chickens on a Sunday, and had one bird that night for dinner. The next day, I had half a bird and a left-over baked potato for lunch, and another half a bird and some quinoa salad the following day. My plan has been working out pretty well, and this week I’ve been eating a great lamb stew that I made for my brother and his family.

I knew when I wanted to make them the lamb stew that I would need to do something to stretch it. I wasn't thinking of the stone-soup folk tale, but it's a bit like what happened. They didn't bring stones, but I brought clams. I made them pasta alle vongole, too, as a first course, and we all had plenty of food to eat. And there was plenty of it left over.

One nice thing about this lamb stew is that it has pinto beans and lima beans in it. Even if your serving of the stew doesn't have much meat, you are still getting a lot of nutrition. At first, I thought it was an odd combination of ingredients (and I don't even like lima beans, ordinarily), but I had great faith in the cookbook where I found the recipe. It comes from one of my favorite ones, Food and Wine's collection from 2001. I just checked on Amazon. It apparently is out of print, but you can get new copies for $0.75, and used copies for $0.13. Now that's a great way to save money. If you're looking for a good cookbook, look no further.

And how does the stew taste? It reminded me of the finest daube I ever had, one cooked about a decade ago in Provence by a friend who had rented Patricia Wells's house there. The hint of red wine took me right back to those halcyon days in the French countryside.

 

Never-Ending Lamb Stew, with Beans and Olives

 

• 1 cup dried pinto beans—soaked overnight in water to cover, drained and rinsed
• 1 bay leaf
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 2 pounds boneless lamb shoulder, cut into 2-inch, or smaller, pieces
• Salt and freshly ground pepper
• 2 1/2 ounces finely chopped pancetta
• 1 tablespoon unsalted butter
• 3 large shallots, minced
• 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 2 tablespoons tomato paste
• 1/3-1/2 cup dry red wine
• 4 cups stock (I used vegetable stock, from bullion, which is all I had on hand, but the original recipe calls for 4 cups beef stock or 1 can low-sodium beef broth diluted with 3 cups of water)
• 1 1/2 cups frozen baby lima beans
• 2/3 cup Calamata olives, pitted and halved
• 1/4 cup coarsely chopped parsley

In a medium saucepan, cover the dried beans with water. Simmer the beans with the bay leaf over low heat until tender, about 45 minutes. Leave the beans in their cooking water.

In a medium enameled cast-iron casserole, heat 1 tablespoon of the oil. Add half of the lamb and season with salt and pepper. Brown the meat over moderately high heat, about 3 minutes per side; transfer to a plate. Repeat with the remaining oil and lamb.

Add the pancetta and butter to the casserole and cook over low heat until the pancetta is slightly crisp, about 4 minutes.

Add the shallots and cook until softened but not browned, 3 to 5 minutes.

Stir in the flour and cook, stirring, for 1 minute.

Stir in the tomato paste and then the wine and simmer, stirring, for 3 minutes.

Whisk in the stock until smooth and bring to a boil.

Return the lamb to the casserole and simmer over low heat, skimming a few times, until the lamb is tender, about 1 hour.

Drain the dried beans, add them to the stew and simmer for 15 minutes longer.

Cook the lima beans in a small saucepan of boiling water until tender, about 4 minutes; drain well.

Add the lima beans to the stew and season with salt and pepper.

Stir in the olives.

Spoon the stew into shallow bowls, sprinkle with the parsley and serve.

Note: The lamb stew can be prepared ahead up until the point where you cook and add the lima beans. And the original recipe, from Food & Wine, can be found here.

 

 

 

Pork Roast Recipe

This morning, I jostled past my fellow commuters and climbed the subway stairs in Midtown. Coming up to the bright street, I caught sight of the sunlight on an office building’s marbled facade, and I was reminded of why I live in New York City.  I need to have people around. I love their energy and creativity. To me, the buildings of Manhattan are a physical manifestation of the human imagination.

On a smaller scale, I see cooking the same way. The meal is a creation of the imagination, and it brings people together. The other day, Santa Maria ran into an old friend in the neighborhood. She was having her kitchen renovated, so we made plans to have her over for dinner.

The night we got together, our friend, who is a literary agent, was coming from a meeting with one of her writers from out of town. That meeting ran late, and as happens with writers, there were some complications. The writer lives on a farm, and he had spent the day harvesting apples. He hadn’t eaten since that morning.  We took him in, and served him dinner.

I had planned on serving a pork roast, and it was large enough for an extra guest, even one who was hungry from laboring in the field all day. This pork roast is a great party dish, because it doesn’t require much active work. Once you put in the oven, all you need to do is keep an eye on it, and make sure the pan doesn’t dry out.

Pork chops are often served with applesauce, and this roast is based on that idea. I put the meat on top of slices of apples and pieces of sage, and as it roasts, the apples cook up nicely with the pan drippings and the herbs. The result is  not exactly applesauce, but it’s delicious. Just ask the apple farmer. He loved it.

Pork Roast Recipe

• 1 apple, washed, cored, and sliced
• 1 bunch sage, washed
• 4-6 cloves of garlic, to taste
• One 2-3 lb boneless pork roast
• Salt, to taste

 

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees

Slice the garlic into thick pieces, and with a pointy knife, stab a bunch of holes in the top and sides of the pork roast. Put the garlic slices along with bits of sage into the holes

Salt the meat

Lay the apple slices on the bottom of a roasting pan (for a piece of meat this size, I use a small ceramic pan) in roughly the same area as the size of the pork roast

Lay a few sage leaves over and under the slices

Perch the pork roast on top of the apples. The apples should be under the meat. They can be stacked a few layers high. Just don't leave them in the pan uncovered by the meat.

Pour a bit of water in the pan so the bottom of it isn't dry.

Put the meat into the oven and roast for about 30-45 mintues. Make sure the pan doesn't dry out. You don't want anything to burn in the pan. Add more water as you go along, if necessary.

After about 30 to 45 minutes, turn the heat down to 350, and continue to roast until the meat is 150 degrees internal, about an hour to an hour-and-a-half total.

Let the meat sit for ten minutes before slicing and serving.

Gather the apples and sage in a bowl and serve on the side.

 

Finally, the Chicken Fajita Recipe

I keep this blog to assist other dads (and all folks) learn about cooking, and one nice thing about it is that it also helps me. Over the weekend we had a mad dash from a cousin’s birthday party to dinnertime, and I had a whole flounder to cook. I knew how to do it, but couldn’t remember the details. Luckily, I had blogged about it before, and dinner was ready in thirty minutes.

A few weeks ago, I made chicken fajitas for the first time, but I got too busy to blog about the dinner. Bummer. On Friday, I wanted to make the fajitas again, but I had to start thinking from scratch. Thinking is hard enough for me, so if I’ve done it once, I don’t like to have to do it again.

Of course, fajitas don’t require much thought at all, unless one heads to the web for suggestions. That’s where things get confusing. Food and Wine had a recipe for fajitas made with powdered onion and powdered garlic. Powdered onion? Powdered garlic? Really? Others required marinating the chicken for three hours. Some included soy sauce. Say what? Nothing, seemed right, so I decided to wing it.

I wasn’t sure how well seasoned chicken would go over with the girls, so in keeping with my philosophy of making one meal out of multiple parts that appeal to all, I decided to cook half the chicken in a simple fashion with a bit of lemon. The rest of the chicken I hit with a bit of chili powder, some Worcestershire sauce (another of the ideas from the Internet) and a touch of lime.

As I sautéed the seasoned chicken, Nina popped her head into the kitchen, and said, “I smell French fries.” I pointed to the chicken, and gave her a taste; she liked it. I caramelized slices of onion and sautéed slices of red pepper, and served everything with fresh guacamole, salsa, and warmed, soft corn tortillas. In the middle of eating, Pinta said, “How did you make this awesome dinner?” Nina replied that it wasn’t that awesome. “There are more awesome meals, like Bolognese,” she said.

Chicken Fajitas

• Avocado, onion, tomato, cilantro, and lime for guacamole and fresh salsa.
• 1 onion, peeled and sliced lengthwise
• 1 red pepper, seeded and sliced lengthwise
• A dash of chili pepper, optional
• A shake of Worcestershire sauce, optional
• 1 to 3 boneless chicken breasts
• a bunch of cilantro, washed
• 6-8 soft corn tortillas

If you want to season the chicken, cut the chicken breasts into strips and toss in a dish with the chili pepper, Worcestershire sauce, and, if you like, lime juice. Let this marinate while the peppers and onions cook down.

Saute the onions in one pan, until soft, and in a second pan, do the same with the peppers.

If you don't want to season the chicken, simply slice the breasts in half lenthwise (so they are thin) and saute them in a frying pan with a bit of oil over a high heat. While the first side cooks, squeeze a bit of lemon juice on the meat. After the first side is nicely browned, flip the breast and finish cooking through.

After the chicken has cooked through, slice it crosswise into strips.

The seasoned chicken strips can be sauteed next, in the same pan.

Warm the tortillas in a frying pan bring to the table with everything else. Serve by wrapping the chicken and onions and peppers and guacamole and salsa in a tortilla. Top with fresh cilantro.

Taking a Break with a Home-Cooked Steak

The back-to-school period has been more complicated than we expected (there have been issues with Pinta's school), and I've found it difficult to make the time to blog. With things so stressful, I thought it would be nice to cook Santa Maria something special.

Last night, for the first time in a long time, I cooked a steak at home. I took time out from my day to stop by Whole Foods, and pick up a prime piece of grass-fed New York Strip. Wilson, the man behind the counter, tutored me in how to cook it: Salt it, and let it rest on the counter for an hour before cooking; heat a cast-iron frying pan, and render the fat from the edge of the steak on the pan; char up one side nicely, then flip and turn down to medium heat for three-to-five minutes.

This sounded simple enough, but the steak was very thick and I ended up fliping it back and forth a few times before pulling it from the pan. Even at that point it wasn't done correctly, so I ended up cutting it in half and searing it one more time. Not the greatest outcome, but tasty none-the-less.

I accompanied it with mushroom risotto and sugar snap peas. This was not the kind of cooking I do every day, and it felt good to be standing at the stove with top-notch ingredients at the late hour of 9 p.m. We cracked open a bottle of wine and enjoyed our dinner. Then Santa Maria fell asleep on the couch, and I did the dishes.

Red Lentil Dhal Saves The Day

James Joyce's last words were "Does nobody understand?" I ocassionally think of this while trying to make plans with friends and family members. Despite, (or is it because of?) the ease of text messages, emails, Facebook postings, tweets, and other means of staying in touch, communicating with loved ones can be a little bit like modernist literature: utterly confusing.

So it was over the weekend, when plans with old friends suddenly coalesced around a midday walk in the park with the kids. To any ordinary human, this might seem perfectly sensible, but it sent my mind racing. I quickly wondered, “What will we eat? What can I serve them?”

Because I’m constantly obsessing about food, my larder is almost always well stocked (after my trip to the store this week, Santa Maria started a new shopping list with the words “NO MORE CHEESE” written atop it). After a moment’s thought, I conjured a quick answer: my old favorite, spicy red-lentil dhal. It takes less than an hour to make, and, after all, I already had a pot of rice cooked, and waiting, in the fridge.

Red Lentil Dhal

• Olive oil
• 1 onion quartered lengthwise and thinly sliced crosswise 
• 2 bay leaves 
• One 2 inch or so cinnamon stick 
• 2 teaspoons (or more) of minced fresh ginger 
• 3 cloves of garlic 
• 1 dash of cayenne pepper 
• 2 cups small red lentils, about a pound, rinsed
• 1 lemon, halved and juiced (seeds removed) 
• 3 or 4 cups of chicken stock 
• 3 or 4 cups of hot water  
• 1 teaspoon salt 

Heat the oil in a heavy sauce pan

Add the onion, bay leaves, and cinnamon stick

Saute until the onions are translucent

Add the garlic and the ginger and the cayenne

Continue cooking another few minutes

Add the lentils and stir to coat them with oil

Add the chicken stock and the water

Add the lemon juice and the squeezed halves of the fruit

Add the salt

Bring to a boil

Reduce to a simmer

Cook for about a half hour, until the onions mostly break up and the lentils more or less dissolve. If it looks like it needs more water, add some. 

Notes:

This freezes remarkably well. It is best served with rice. To make it more fancy, caramelize some onions to go on top, along with some plain yogurt, and some chopped cilantro. 

Back From the Beach With Some New Music

We were out of town for the holiday weekend, which now seems like six years ago—with the get-the-kids-to-school morning scrambles now well underway, I miss summer more than I thought possible.

We took our vacation in Montauk, a most magical place where the beaches are surrounded by high buffs that the wind has carved into fantastical shapes mirroring the rocks of Cappadocia. The surf was high, the company amazing, and the weather great. Traffic was another story, though, and after a long, long trip back to New York City on a parking-lot-like Route 27, I was relieved to find a bag of Bolognese in our freezer.

This is my tip for the day: always be able to replace a last-minute take-out meal with one from your freezer. It requires a bit of planning (to make the sauce ahead of time), but think of the comfort, pleasure, and happiness of knowing that you are moments away from a good meal whenever you might need one. Even if your stuck in traffic.

I know I've written about Bolognese before, so for those readers who know its joys, I want to leave you with something else--a bit of new music. While we were at the rental house, we listened to Beirut, a little indie-rock group with a Balkan-vibe led by a talented young songwriter named Zach Condon. Here's the title track to their latest album, fittingly enough dubbed "The Rip Tide."

 

 

Santa Maria Wants Lobster

Cooking and eating lobster is much like becoming a parent: simple to initiate, yet challenging to finish. Let’s start with the cooking. Sometimes in life, the things that look the hardest are the easiest to pull off. Bring a little water to boil in a big pot on a high heat, salt the water, drop the lobsters in, cover, wait a few minutes (fifteen-minutes for a pound-and-a-half one) and you’re done. There’s really nothing to it.

I’m a little blasé about cooking lobsters for two reasons. The first is that when I was much younger I worked at a retail seafood market and I cooked hundreds of them during my tenure there. The second is that when I was much younger, I worked in a retail fish market, and I picked and cleaned a countless number of the crustaceans. I got a bit sick of them.

Santa Maria, on the other hand, loves lobster, and all summer long she’s been pining away for one. Last August, we took a day trip to the Mohonk Mountain House, and she ate three of them (two belonged to Nina and Pinta, who have inherited my tastes in this department; we had to buy four dinners to get access to the resort’s grounds). A couple of times this year we’ve made plans to get and cook lobsters, but we’ve been foiled for various reasons (on vacation, they were $16 a pound!).

This past weekend, though, I returned to my old stomping grounds, the great Mt. Kisco Seafood, where I caught up with old friends and picked up a few lobsters. My friends there made sure the lobsters had hard shells, and that’s important. A newly molted, soft-shell lobster will have much less meat in it.

These were hardy, pound-and-a-half animals, and when I showed the live ones to my girls, Pinta reacted with a frightened look that made me think of the scene in “Annie Hall” where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton struggle with runaway lobsters. But I showed her how they’re not scary. They’re easy to hold behind the head, where their claws can’t reach you, and they’re very slow moving out of the water (nothing like live blue-claw crabs, which will make you pay very quickly if you let one get away).

We had our lobsters in the back yard. The breeze was cool and the light was soft. Santa Maria dipped her lobster in lemon butter, and we all enjoyed a late-summer treat. If you want a good, illustrated set of instructions on how to eat a lobster, the Gulf of Maine Research Institute has created one, here.