SWF: Hey Courtster. Wanna come over for lobster tomorrow?
Me: Uh Duh. Yes.
That first dinner was pretty slamming and since then the tradition has kept up, hangovers not withstanding. Every year we have been getting a little more hardcore culminating in our rendition of Thomas Keller's Butter Poached Lobster on Sauteed Leeks with Pommes Maxim and a Beet Reduction last year. Now smart wine friend is the pragmatic one. He is organized, neat and always insists on impeccable presentation. I, on the other hand, am over-ambitious, under-skilled and not the least bit organized.
But this year, we kept it simple. Neither of us were feeling up to butter poaching, or stacking Portale style, a lobster claw on top of its tail, on top of a puree and underneath some fried thing, much less leaving the warm confines of our apartments with our significant others in tow.
Canneloni was the initial thought weeks ago, before New Year's Eve reveling got in the way. But neither of us could agree on a sauce and on the day of, neither of us wanted to drag out the pasta maker.
Plain old boiled lobster or roasted lobster would have been simple but neither of us could fathom boiling something and just throwing it on a plate.
There were emails. Recipes. Arguments. Smoke Signals. Mom Jokes. And finally we settled on:
http://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/spicy-lobster-noodle-salad
Jean-Georges Vongerichten's Spicy Asian Noodle and Lobster recipe it was. Light enough to satisfy the requirements of most New Year's resolutions, spicy enough to get your taste buds going, yet hearty enough to fill us all up. The only subs we made were using Bean threads instead of cellophane noodles and Elderflower syrup instead of Elderflower Cordial (the latter being much thinner than the former, but an equivalent amount of syrup was fine in this recipe.)
The final product:
Looks a little weird in the picture, but was beautiful in person (my mom used to say that about me a lot when I was a kid). And delicious. Hopefully 2010 will continue to be just that: delicious, light, beautiful and a little spicy.
