Cooking Live Lobster

I know. Life is full of conflicted emotions, yes?

I have cooked at least a thousand lobsters at restaurants before.

(The reason why lobster meat comes out mealy, mushy, mashie sometimes is because it was dead and one should not eat the meat then.)

It was years ago and we just boiled water and took them out of the fridge and dropped them in then set them up on a plate in a rather complicated procedure. It was a job then and I never really gave it much thought.

That is until this experience.
I am getting to old to wrestle with lively crustaceans, why tempt fate?

I can eat veal, but not the milkfed kind, preferably grass fed in italy or humboldt county. Once in a blue moon.

I've rarely had lobster and mostly haven't liked it that much. Only once, back when my italian class was held at a student's house in Santa Monica. What a meal. First of all, we all (7 of us, perhaps in our fifth quarter of italian) took our exams in the dining room, something like an hour's worth of tough written questions, and as we finished got started in the kitchen.
Uh, oh, I'm digressing.
Anyway, the hostess had the long table at the back patio all set like in some magazine.. had prepped a big salad, etc.

The teacher taught us to make fresh fettucine, and not like you see on any cooking show.. much sloppier, and it turned out incredibly delicious.

Anyway, I had brought a long slow cooked bolognese sauce, and the hostess was making a dish (Lorenza di Medici) involving lobster in a garlic butter sauce. Cutting to the chase, the lobster was already dead as a doornail, that is, precooked.

That lobster sauce was fabulous with that fettucine.

But, I'm positive I could never cook one, and not from fear of grabbing it.

Also remembering a scene in a Woody Allen movie, Annie Hall..
I just checked on youtube and couldn't find it.

<thought the Homer flic was perfect>

The worst attempt at cooking lobster I ever witnessed was the night my M-I-L was making a paella. She took two live lobsters and chopped off their claws and tails. then she cut the bodies lengthwise and threw them into a hot paella pan. I swear the parts were jumping around the pan trying to get out.

Off course it was delicious, but we gave her so much grief about it that I don't think she ever used whole live lobsters for paella again.






Is anyone still hungry?

No way I would do boil anything alive.

One kills them first...I heard the freezer method was the best???

Eh.
It takes life to sustain life. Im not squeamish.


But lobster meat never did flip my lid.
Tasted like over priced rubber .

Ain't no good lobster where you be...

Nope.
Texas lobster.


blaaagh.

New Mexico lobster is better.
>snort

7:40 into the clip.

Anyway, for real -- make friends with the fish guy and get him to do it (dispatch the lobster).

Oh, ****..

True story!

What can I say, it was all about the chocolate milk!

Thanks, Jes. Memories of seeing that in the first place.

Can't tell if it was a bad thing for the lobster world.




Me, who can't sing at all, I am guessing Keaton (or whomever worked the voice) had pitch control..

I believe you, that's what's scary..

However, I admit to buying from a crab shack in Humboldt County where at something like a max 5 foot distance I saw them plunge the wriggling crabs. Ok, once, when my bro in law and niece were visiting. Also remember big yellow containers with salt water and wriggling crabs at Trinidad pier.

So, maybe I can learn from this thread - is refrigerating or freezing somehow better than a roiling boilathon, and exactly how?

Lobsters are delicious. I refuse to think of them as sentient beings, though. I consider them "ocean bugs."

Our friends on Cape Cod cook them all the time, but even they were a bit dismayed when I named them first.

Pass the butter, please.

Oh, gee, Feelie, Sneezy, Pokey, and so on..

Feelie
Pokey
Bubbly
Jaws
Red
Clamp

Yes, yes! Kill the poor bloody critter first! Is that so difficult?

(moving on quickly ....)

replying to self, I'm not against eating lobsters, given they're not endangered, but I'd like to not somehow join in lobster torture..

the crab shack thing might not be so bad - indeed I wasn't thinking it was at the time -

Hell, fish in general would doubtless prefer not to be caught by humans or eaten by other fish or be whale hor d'oevres, however you spell that.

We are so separated, generally if not specifically, re our production of food.

Actually, there were four of us (two couples) and four lobsters. I thought they were all being very silly about the whole thing. So I named them Lucy, Ricky, Fred and Ethel.

"Look out, Lucy--here comes Ethel!" I announced.......<splash>
(Two people cringed, one yelled, "Stop that!")