Fotocuisine

There’s a seafood store nearby that has some pretty good local seafood, but also flies in lobster from Maine. They have a sale from time to time, and for this part of Florida, $7.95/lb is almost half the going rate. I picked up a couple lobster and decided to make fresh lobster rolls.

Now, the New England lobster roll is pretty basic — fresh lobster, mayo, a lettuce leaf, a roll or bun, and maybe some seasoning. I don’t think lobster rolls spawn the same sort of debates that cheesesteaks do in Philly, or pizza does between New York and Chicago, but when I’m in Boston I don’t see a lot of debate over the ingredients.

On the other hand, I’ve found that substituting homemade aioli for mayo will almost always give an interesting spin on a meal. This is still a pretty simple meal, but Christey and I were sadly eying the crumbs on our plates when we were done, wishing for more.

lobstah

Christey and I met when I was living in Treasure Island, Florida, a suburb of St Petersburg. A block away from my house was one of our favorite restaurants, Karim’s Bistro, a Moroccan/Mediterranean place located in one of the gaudiest hotels on the beach. Karim has since opened his own stand-alone restaurant a short walk away, The Pearl.

One of Karim’s signature dishes was a lobster ravioli in a champagne cream sauce. There are a bunch of other restaurants that have a lobster ravioli, it’s not an original concept, but Karim’s was my favorite.

My birthday was last month, and I got a pasta machine, something on my to-buy list for a while. So, for my inaugural pasta event, I decided to try to reproduce (as much as I could), my favorite version of lobster ravioli.

Lobster. Cream. Pasta. You know you want to read more.

Michelle, over at Thursday Night Smackdown has a First Thursday challenge. Yesterday was the first Thursday of the month, and the theme was The Grill. The challenge is to pick a recipe you’ve never tried, using the theme, and bang it out. As usual for our First Thursday challenge, Christey and I switched roles — I shot the photos, and Christey cooked (though she edited the photos and I’m writing the post).

Christey was paging through cookbooks and magazines last week, looking for a recipe. I had the July Saveur out, as I was still doing the gravlax thing, and she said, “Oooh! Citrus grilled lobster tails!” and pointed out the recipe to me.

“That’s not a recipe from the magazine, it’s an ad for Frei Brothers wine,” I said.

“Who cares? It’s a recipe, and it’s lobster on the grill!”

“You have a good point,” I said.

So, for Christey’s very first grilling experience as chef, we present to you the Frei Brothers winery recipe of Grilled Lobster Tail, with Salad and Citrus Dressing:

Fire and shellfish, what’s not to love?

So, we are going camping next weekend, and this weekend heading out to St. Petersburg to see family. We asked Peter’s mom if she would mind watching our youngest one (7 mths old) next weekend while we take our other three kids out camping with us.

She bargained.

Peter had just sent her a link to our last lobster dinner and that got her taste buds wanting some lobster tonight, so she said if we bring lobster tonight she will watch Jules next weekend.

Sounds like a win win deal to me!

Ten years ago, I had a client in Phoenix, Arizona. About a week a month, I’d shuttle out to the desert from Atlanta, do some biz, see some sights, and eat some food. I was really starting my foodie-ness about then, and at one restaurant, I was stunned to taste the best Hawaiian ahi tuna I’d ever had in my life. In Phoenix. More than 5000 miles away from the seas where that fish was caught.

I’m a fan of cooking local; supporting local farms or fishermen or using local ingredients. I think it’s a good thing to do for cuisine, a good thing for the environment, a good thing for local economies.

However, one of my culinary quirks is taking an established cuisine or technique, then throwing in something from halfway around the world. I think part of this comes from that time in Phoenix, where I could nibble on fresh tuna when it was still 105 degrees outside at 8pm. The world still has a lot of problems, but I think there are times where the internet and FedEx have brought ideas and physical chunks of the planet to places which may not have otherwise experienced them. And that can be a good thing.

All of this philosophy is too lofty for last night’s meal, though. I wanted to go a little crazy and throw together far-flung techniques and food, and jam them into one dish with, I hope, a little elegance and extravagance.

So, I made pan-roasted Maine lobster, put it in a corn tortilla nest, covered it with a French-influenced sauce Supreme/Mornay, with plenty of New Mexican Red Chile. And we ate it here — Spring in Florida.

Live lobstah await their fate