Fancy Dinner

I love fancy dinners. Eating them, making them, reading about them, photographing them - if it's related to a fancy dinner, I am down. So naturally, when the most blessed event of the year was announced, I seized the opportunity to make Mellis, Dan, and myself a very fancy meal.

I turned to this guy for help:

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The French Laundry cookbook: a weighty tome devoted to recreating meals from one of the best restaurants in America. It details fussy, multi-step recipes requiring, for instance, twelve lobster bodies to boil down into a garnish, or fresh Perigord black truffles to chop up and use in dip. Not for every day.

Fortunately, there is a fantastic blog written by Carol Blymire, who, over the course of ~two years, made every recipe in the damn thing, so with her step-by-step instructions and the occasional cheat, I settled on Parmigiano Cups with Goat Cheese Mousse to start (this is a cheat - I've made it before and it's easy), followed by some kind of fancy salad and then Lobster Crepes with Ginger-Carrot Emulsion and Pea Shoots as the main course.  For dessert I'd churn some salted caramel ice cream, a spectacular recipe from Amanda Hesser that made Dan, upon tasting it, drop his spoon, fall to the floor, and curl into a ball of speechless joy.

First up were the Parmigiano Cups, which were child's play.  Melt some discs of grated parmesan cheese in the oven, allow to slightly cool, and then shape into cups using an egg carton for your mold.  Blend goat cheese with some flavorings and a little cream.  Voila!

The lobsters required a little more work.  Because I am a wimp, I asked the guy at the lobster place (which is called, incidentally, The Lobster Place) to kill the lobsters for me.  Then I cooked them using a modified version of Thomas Keller's excellent "steeping" method, which involves boiling a giant pot of water, turning off the heat, and then adding the lobsters.  They cook for two minutes, after which you remove them, return the claws to the pot for an additional five minutes, and then, while the lobsters are still hot, remove the meat from the shell.  The theory is that extreme heat, as you'd get from boiling or even steaming, makes the meat seize up and get tough.  By cooking them just a little at a somewhat lower temperature, you get all the meat out of the shell and then finish cooking them with another method later.  This was my second time doing it, and it works.  The meat stays extremely tender and sweet.

As that was going on, I made the carrot-ginger sauce, which involves manually juicing three pounds of carrots with some ginger buying 2 cups of carrot juice and letting it simmer down with some ginger before whisking in a frightening amount of butter.

I also made some crepes.  Hot tip: a small offset spatula (ordinarily recommended for icing cakes) is my new & improved tool for flipping crepes.  I usually ruin half of them, and this time I only tore one!

Once all those components were done, the lobster filling (lobster meat, mascarpone cheese, shallots, chives) got rolled into the crepes and baked for ten minutes, and then placed on a pool of the ginger-carrot (carrots!) sauce and then topped with a little pea shoot salad (peas!).  It looked like this:

Yes!  It worked!  The craziest part is that BY FAR the best part of this dish was not the laboriously prepped lobster filling, but the carrot sauce.  This carrot sauce was out of control.  Creamy, buttery, structured, smooth, slightly sweet - I will make this again.  I will put it on anything.  It was insane.  The crepes and pea shoot salad were delicious as well, but dear lord this sauce.  Go buy some carrot juice and make it today.

So that was dinner.  My camera got stolen a few weeks ago (sniff) so that's it for pictures.  We ate, we drank, and we played with the laser pointer.

Life is good.

OMG

MUST. ATTEND.

A Proclamation

It was a big weekend. Dan and I went out to Long Island for some wine tasting fun, we visited our friend's gigantic apartment in Spanish Harlem, and I went to IKEA out in Red Hook. Red Hook, you say? Obviously, Meghan, if you happened to be in Red Hook, you went to try the fabled lobster roll at the Red Hook Lobster Pound, right? Well, you're right! I did.

My friends, for some time now, I have wanted to say, declaratively, that I can name the best lobster roll in New York. But until now, I couldn't do it. I hadn't had the one from RHLP. It's consistently written up as a good one - if you're unfamiliar, they have a stand at the Brooklyn Flea and people will happily wait in line at said stand for two hours - so how could I say I knew the One True Roll without a sample?

I need wait no longer.

I went to the store.

I watched the lady butter-grill the bun and add an ice cream scoop's worth of lobster salad, a dusting of paprika, and a sprinkle of scallions.

I admired it.

And I took a bite, expecting big things...

... but it was just ok. The bun was all wrong, and the scallions took away from the delicious lobstery sweetness. I guess they're there for flavor balance, but this is a lobster roll. Balance is beside the point. It might taste better after two hours in line ?

So, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, I give you: the best lobster roll in all of New York City: after a year of tasting, many many dollars I'll never get back, and cholesterol levels that concern my doctor, it's the roll that originally stole my heart.

I give you... the roll from Pearl Oyster Bar.



(Or, if you don't want to spend thirty bucks... the one from Luke's).

My Big Fat Italian Weekend

The first clue should have been the invitation. Somehow it escaped me that a convention center reception would indicate a large wedding.

And large it was! Five hundred and fifty-nine guests for the biggest, fattest Italian wedding I've ever seen. The ceremony was in a small cathedral, and featured a 24-person bridal party.

When we entered the reception, a large table draped in crab legs, lobster tails, and oysters greeted us, not to be outdone by the table with the live-pianist centerpiece.

Once in the reception proper, a parade of waiters entered, carrying bottles of (literally) sparkling champagne .

Then they brought me a lobster dinner.

And Babcia stopped by with her chainsaw!

Life is good.

Oh God: Update

Dan and I visited Dr. Claw last night.

Dan doesn't really like lobster rolls (?!), but he got pretty excited when he saw these.

Succulent claw and knuckle meat dressed in butter!

Hubby has been converted.

I plan to visit Dr. Claw once a week until the Department of Health shuts him down or my cholesterol renders me bedridden: whichever comes first.*

*UPDATE: Department of Health.  Bummer.

Oh God

I have written in the past about my insatiable craving for lobster rolls. They are a gift from God (well, not to the lobsters, who die a horrible boiling death for the honor of appearing in said gift.*). Something about the combination of lobster meat tossed with the little bit of steaming juices mixed with mayo or butter to create a crack-like substance that coats over everything, squished into a top-sliced Pepperidge Farm hot dog roll just sends me into ecstasy.

I have recently had rolls from Luke's Lobster and from The Mermaid Inn, and these small tastes have only fed my insane jonesing. Luke's is fantastic, potentially the best in the city - but small. Mermaid Inn's has too much celery. Pearl's is too expensive. Mary's too mayo-y. Lobster Place and Urban Lobster make mediocre rolls, hardly worth mentioning, but there's one place I haven't tried, that just might have the quality of Luke's with the addition of using an actual top-sliced Pepperidge Farm hot dog roll (delicious) and not being located near no convenient subway line.

This place has no storefront or phone number, and it is LESS THAN A BLOCK FROM MY APARTMENT. It's a dude in his basement known as The Underground Lobstah Pushah, or, by his shorter alias, Dr. Claw. I'm not kidding.

You order by text and then pick it up in a manner not unlike a drug deal. I just got the number. It's $14, a steal.

I'm having one tonight.

And maybe tomorrow night.

I'm going to get so fat.

*My research into lobster killing has taught me that lobsters actually have no brain, but a simple nervous system of eight ganglia. Isn't that interesting? To kill them instantly, you must drive a heavy knife directly between their eyes. I think I'll stick with dropping them in a pot and then running out of the room.

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Arghhhhhh

I have lobster rolls on my mind.  I get into these states a couple of times a year, where for every meal I'm like... maybe I should have a lobster roll...



But DUDE, I don't want the crappy one from The Lobster Place, the super expensive one from Pearl, or the good-and-decently-priced but super far from my office one from Luke's (above, pictured).

New York and the Amateur Gourmet aren't helping me by publishing paeans to this most delicious of sandwiches.  Look at this picture of the roll from Pearl:


I want to dive in and swim around a little.  Oh God.  I am not helping myself by writing this blog post.  I've never even had this one from the Red Hook Lobster Pound, and I think the paprika thing looks kind of weird, but I WANT IT.



Maybe I can take a bus to Luke's.

Maine Economics

Dinner last night, for eight people. Lobster, mussels, and clam chowder all around. Enough that I had a food baby. PLENTY of chowder and mussels left over for today.

Total bill: $69.

Ummmmm let's move here.

Lobster Mac n' Cheese

Although for food publications, 2009 has been The Year of Barbecue, as opposed to last year's Year of The Burger, I fondly remember The Year of Mac n' Cheese. It was like when Observe and Report and Paul Blart: Mall Cop came out in the same quarter: the collective brain of New York City restaurants started cooking up mac n' cheese with truffles or caviar or truffle oil or abalone or all of the above. They would always use $38/lb cheeses. The appetizer portion of white-truffle mac n' cheese at Waverly Inn was listed at $55. Most of them were mediocre. Strange, I know.

Anyway, one of the less-bad parts of moving is finishing all the food in the house, and while inventorying the fridge last week, I discovered two frozen, forgotten lobster tails from a Costco binge in May. We defrosted them and broiled them up, but they hadn't necessarily frozen perfectly. I've always wanted to make a fancypants mac n' cheese, but have never been able to bring myself to waste a gorgeous, fresh lobster on a cheese sauce.

Bingo.

Problem, though, is that I don't have a good recipe. Do I make a thick bisque-like sauce and pour it over the warmed pasta and sea bug meat? Or, can I just make my usual casserole of sin and mix the lobster into it before baking? Will that overcook the lobster? Why is the Internet being COMPLETELY UNHELPFUL in this? Oh lord, I forgot I have half a tub of truffle butter in the fridge. This is going to be good.

Summer Friday

Summer Fridays are quite the best. I sauntered down Bleecker and bought myself a lobster (I was really jonesing for a lobster roll but I can only go to Pearl once a quarter). They didn't have any already steamed, as is ideal for making your own Bun o' Deliciousness, so I bought a live one and had the dude um... take care of it. If you're even slightly squeamish and/or feel that there's a better way to prepare your sea bug than by boiling it alive, I highly recommend this plan. Anyway. I also opened a new checking account during my afternoon off, but that's neither here nor there.

Lobster rolls are so freaking good, you guys! I made my lobster salad out of tail meat and homemade mayonnaise with a little extra lemon juice and salt and pepper. It would've been even better with chives and a little celery. I didn't have any hot dog buns, so I browned a sandwich saver and loaded it up.

(Sandwich Savers are grossly processed and stay fresh for an uncomfortable amount of time, but they're like 100 calories and they taste so good!)

It was delicious. Best of all, I have enough lobster salad left over for another. It was basically a large, scrumptious snack. I think I'll have some marinated kale salad and then see if I'm up for round two, which I can eat while watching half of The Dark Knight on HBO, before going to look for a dress for wedding #4 at Beacon's! Oh MAN I love summer Fridays!

Kale: Super Food In Multiple Ways

Last night, I got a lobster roll for dinner. It's an indulgent, almost naughty thing that I like to do every so often. Once every, say, seven months? I couldn't finish it, though, so I took half of it home for lunch today. Only I forgot it, so I thought I'd have it for dinner. Only looking at it, I thought, "I need to eat something besides this half a lobster with an amount of mayo I'd rather not exactly know in a hot bog bun that's been browned in butter" and "that something else had better be healthy." So I tasted a little bit of this marinated kale salad that I made last week and was planning on chucking, and lo and behold: it's still good.

This is huge. Kale is a "superfood," which means that if you eat enough of it you can jump off buildings and not get hurt. Kale is also, when steamed or boiled or prepared in any way by my hands, gross. Still, I bought a huge bunch of it last week in a fit of "shopping for health," and because I want to eat as much in my fridge as possible before the move, had been looking for way to eat it ever since.

This miraculous salad comes from Heartbreak Soup, a blog that you will know if you are really into New York City media gossip, and won't if you live elsewhere and/or have a mostly offline life. It's kind of like Cooking for Mr. Latte, except subsitute all the new relationship and wedding stuff with breakups. Emily, the intrepid narrator, returns to Greenpoint after an extended, messy breakup with her longtime boyfriend to visit some friends. She's oh-so-wistful about this neighborhood that she's left and longs to return to some state of normalcy. Her pal "Scuttlebutt" feeds her this "improbably addictive" and "very, very healthy" salad of raw kale with lemon juice and carrot coins.

"Raw kale? Improbably delicious?" I thought. "Bitch, please." But I made it. And, Bitch, PLEASE! As in, please share more of these magically delicious, ridiculously healthy recipes that somehow stay good in the fridge for like SEVEN DAYS AND COUNTING!

Anyway, if you want to make it, tear a bunch of kale into bite size strips, place them in a bowl, and squeeze a lemon over the whole thing. Salt and pepper a little bit, and then add some thinly cut carrots if you like (she also uses avocado; I didn't have one, but they would probably shorten the shelf life anyway), or maybe some red pepper flakes or sliced raw garlic if that's the way you roll. Massage it all into the kale with your hands so that it gets shiny and kind of wilty. Then wash your hands. Then eat. Save the leftovers. Eat again later.

You're welcome.

Lobstaaaaa

In today's Dining section, Melissa Clark has an article about taking advantage of the current, insanely low price of lobster.

At The Lobster Place near West 4th, for instance, live lobsters are $7.95 per pound, culls are $6.95 (I'm not sure what a cull is, exactly, but I do know that I wouldn't bother with them when the regular ones are under ten bucks) and fully cooked, cleaned, and cracked bad boys are $9.95 a pound.

So this year for Dan's birthday dinner, lobster was obvious. As a present to myself, I spent the extra $2 for the dudes at The Lobster Place to cook it (has there ever been a better-spent $2? No). But what to do with it? Last year I prepared this crazy-ass butter-poached mushroomy feast, which was sweet and all, but I didn't want to get predictable. So, similarly extravagant but totally different: paella.


I tucked chorizo, shrimp, and lots of luscious cooked lobster into a bed of saffron-onion scented rice baked at high heat until crunchy on top and crusty on bottom. I used Mark Bittman's Minimalist method, which is quite easy and means you don't have to follow the Slow Food Movement recipes that you'll find elsewhere, which take three days.

Go make paella! Lobster prices won't be low like this for long!

Thank You, Mr. Big

I love Pearl Oyster Bar. This is no secret. It is New York's most perfect restaurant. Okay, that's a lie; Craft is more perfect. But you can't just drop into Craft, and dinner at Craft is also like eleventy billion dollars (not that Pearl is cheap. A lobster roll is like $28. Granted, it's stuffed with an entire, already-picked lobster, but still--it's a sandwich). Craft is for occasions. Pearl is just a treat.

Because my new office is right by Pearl, I walk by a lot. There's always a crowd, sometimes out the door, which is very good because otherwise I'd probably give in to my lust for lobster rolls and eat there every other day, and then I'd have to wear elastic-waist pants all the time and move back in with my parents. But I still like to peek in and dream. And today, as I strolled past, craning my neck to catch the crowds, who was in the process of hoisting his stroller over the threshold?

Mr. Big!

Ahhhhhh!

Come on, that's an awesome sighting. I immediately called Mom, who, upon mention of both Chris Noth and Pearl, started salivating, and decided we should go to lunch there. Tomorrow! This would never have happened had I seen some B-lister or an actress with a bad rhinoplasty! (Mom can't stand shoddy cosmetic work). Oh, I can taste the sweet chunks of crustacean already, all smooshed in with dressing and that hot dog roll browned in butter. I might even get a beer. It's good to be in the Village.

Thank you, Mr. Big.

Dial L For Murder

Ever killed a lobster? I have. Dan's birthday is today and I am cooking him an epic feast. So that I do not serve him this magnificence with a glazed scowl, I made most of it last night. Thank you, Ina Garten, for teaching me to plan ahead.

The centerpiece: Lobster Poached in Butter. Yes. The sweetest, tenderest, most cholesterol-laden fruit of the sea will get even sweeter, more tender, and increase its lipid count by a brief boil in dairy fat. The method, developed by Thomas Keller of The French Laundry, involves a brief hot-water bath to kill the lobster and cook it just enough to get the delicious innards out of its shell before the final butter poach, and you can do the first part the night before! So here's how you do that.

First, you boil up a Pot of Death.





The steam adds a sinister touch.

Then you take your extremely expensive sea roach out of the freezer, where it has been "desensitizing" for 30 minutes, and put it in a different pot.




Then you see that it is still kind of moving and freak out. But if I am going to eat it, I should be able to kill it. That is what Thomas Keller says, as does the meth-head from Friday Night Lights, and they know their stuff. You contemplate leaving it in the freezer for another like, day, change your mind, pour the Pot of Death over the crustacean, cover it with a very heavy cast-iron lid, and run away to your computer to gchat your nerves and compromised morality away.

Although dear Rupert (yeah, I named it) still had some movement when I removed him from the freezer, the deep-freeze thing seemed to work, because the pot didn't clatter and there was no horrible screaming sound. After 3 minutes I pulled him out and used my hands, kitchen shears, a Leatherman, AND a hammer to dismember the delicious fucker.

At this point I was pretty much over the whole killing conflict. I don't know. I must be hardened.

Mmmmmmmmmmmm.

I'll let you know how the rest goes tomorrow.

Happy Birthday, Dan!

I killed for you!