July 15, 2017 Brunch – Pork and Eggs. Dinner – Broiled lobster and steamed clams with Steamed Broccoli and Cauliflower with Mornay Sauce

July 15, 2017 Brunch – Pork and Eggs.  Dinner – Broiled lobster and steamed clams with Steamed Broccoli and Cauliflower with Mornay Sauce

I ate granola, yogurt, grapes, and milk for breakfast.  Then we rode the 15 mile Southern Loop.

We were tired when we returned and Suzette was hungry, so she made an omelet with PPI pork from last night’s dinner plus some mushrooms.

It was delicious.  We then spent several hours planning and booking our trip to Maine.

At about 2:30 we drove to Home Depot to buy a toilet mechanism for the house and several of Suzette's projects.  I was so jazzed to be going to Maine that after HD we drove to Talin to buy a lobster and clams for dinner.  I bought a beautiful 2.6 lb. lobster and we bought 12 medium sized clams that Suzette thought looked particularly nice.

When we returned home around we discussed wines and decided upon a Sancerre.  I went to the basement a found a bottle of Sancerre and put in the freezer to chill while Suzette took the mini to get it washed.





Then I heated a pot of water to the boil and boiled the lobster for three or four minutes to kill it and then removed the lobster from the water.  I then de-flowered 1/3 head each of a broccoli and cauliflower and steamed them.

Mornay Sauce

While the vegetables were steaming I made a mornay sauce. I started by melting three T. of butter plus pressed two cloves of garlic and three T. of flour cooked in a sauce pan for three minutes to cook the flour.  I also added ¼ tsp. of salt, a dash of white pepper, and a dash of nutmeg to the skillet.  Then I began adding milk and whisking the mixture to thin it out  and then stirred it to allow it to thicken. I sliced about 2 oz. of Jarlsberg cheese and added that to the sauce and stirred the sauce to blend the cheese into the sauce.  After a bit when the sauce had thickened, I added 2 T. of Amontillado sherry.

   Notice how the sauce has thickened and become homogeneous by constant stirring .

When Suzette returned we decided to broil the lobster with butter compounded with tarragon and thyme and garnished with lemon slices.  Suzette picked tarragon and thyme in the garden .  I split the lobster open from head to tail with a knife and lay it flattened on a baking tray.  I then removed about 2 T. of the leaves from the stalks of the tarragon and thyme and chopped them with a clove of garlic and Suzette pushed those ingredients into about four oz. of softened butter to make a Beurre Marie and we coated the exposed lobster meat with the compounded butter mixture.  Suzette then heated the

broiler on the stove and placed the lobster into the oven.

She then filled a large Le Creuset Casserole about 1/3 full with water from the pot used to kill the lobster plus some butter and PPI white wine and placed the clams into the broth.  I threw in a sprig of thyme and we lidded the Casserole and turned up the heat under it to get the broth to a boil to open and cook the clams.

   Notice how Suzette stacks the clams into the Casserole.

I then poured glasses of Sancerre and melted 4 oz. of butter in a bowl in the microwave to which I added the pan dripping from the compounded butter when we removed the lobster from the broiler after about ten minutes of broiling.  Suzette removed the ten clams that had opened and I poured about two cups of the broth in which we cooked the clams into a Pyrex measuring cup to dip the clams into and to drink.  My favorite part of steamed clams is the clam broth.

The meat of the lobster had just congealed and we both realized that it needed more cooking after we removed the meat from the tail section.  Suzette heated her plate Of lobster and vegetables coated with the mornay sauce for 45 seconds, which proved to be a bit too much because the lobster meat toughened and lost its soft watery texture.  I heated my plate for 22 seconds and that seemed to firm the meat without it toughening.  Voila.  After we ate the tail meat we refreshed our vegetables and mornay sauce and attacked the claw meat with hammers and forks.  The combination of clams, vegetables, mornay sauce laced with garlic, tarragon, thyme, and nutmeg and lobster meat drenched in butter sauce was very delicious, but quickly satiated us.  I could not finish my claw meat and a
clam, so it became a PPI.

    The broiled lobster

   The plated lobster tail beside the steamed vegetables coated with mornay sauce

We threw the remaining small claws, tumuli, and lobster shell into the pot of water in which the lobster was boiled plus the remaining clam broth and cooked it while we finished the bottle of Sancerre and watched “Lion”, the story of a five year old Indian boy who gets lost and is raised by a family in Australia, who at the age of 26 figures out where he grew up and returns to India and finds his birth mother.  A lovely story.

We took an intermission from the movie to pour ourselves a glass of cognac and Suzette had a chocolate.

This one one of the greatest meals from a quality of food perspective in a very long time.

The lobster was $18.88/lb. for a total of $50.00.  There was a feature on the financial news on Friday that said that in this year’s harvest of lobsters is larger than usual but the price per pound has not collapsed as it did in the past because sales of lobster to the Chinese market has increased from $1 million about seven years ago to an estimated $84 million this year and that a lobster the size of our 2.5 lb.er would be $100.00.  So, I am happy for the lobstermen, the Chinese, and the ability of the global distribution system for lobster to deliver a beautiful live 2.5 lb. lobster to my local fish market for a reasonable price.

Bon Appetit