So, with Christmas comes traditions. For us, it’s Christmas Eve. Christmas day we are usually jetting off to see everybody in one day with hardly any time to ourselves, so o’er the years we’ve made Christmas Eve “ours”. This year, things were slightly different.
We still curled up on the couch and watched ‘Love Actually’, but instead of our usual Hot Chocolate, we sprung for an elaborate dinner.
Fair warning: If you are squeamish, or vegetarian/vegan…then you probably won’t like this tail of lobster.
For the recipe, make your way into Julia Child’s “Master the Art of French Cooking” and find “Lobster Thermidor”
I won’t sugar coat any of this. So here’s the bullet points:
- Lobster = $$$
- Placing a live lobster in a bath of water/wine/herbs & veggies was an odd task. I felt a lil bit of remorse
- Hacking up the cooked lobster was a wholly mess
- All of the above was forgotten when we had our first taste.
So, here’s a story told in picture form
A Multitude of Ingredients
Preparing the lobster bath...
Lobsta killa...qu'est-ce que c'est
He's uh...."resting"
Kara hacking away
Tempering the egg mixture with the lobster sauce
Sauteing the lobster in butter & brandy
Ready for broiling
Ready for eating...
We cooked up some jasmine rice & braised cucumbers to go along with it.
Rich, complex, tangy and heavenly are all words I would use to describe this dish. Easily one of the best things we’ve ever concocted in our kitchen.
Up next: Our simple, quiet & wonderful Christmas morning.
Mmm.. this sounded so good just when you guys described it, but the pictures look even better! And yes, hes just.. relaxing. A hot bath full of hot vegetables is good for uh.. stress. Yeah.
As Anthony Bourdain would say, “a lobster is basically like a big bug, it’s too dumb to know it’s dead. Anything that you cut into four pieces and all four pieces move independently…that is one dumb f—ing animal.”
That’s what I tell myself every time I bite into one of these big, delicious bugs. But seriously I could eat lobster every single day, and I don’t think I’d ever get tired of it.