The lesson I learned this weekend from her was this: purchasing lobsters for the sole purpose of making homemade lobster rolls for lunch is not only acceptable but should be regular practice for a Saturday in early summer. Spending the day by the pool reading a magazine, retreating from the sun in the early afternoon to steam and shuck (do we use shuck with lobsters?) four whole lobsters for the sole decadent purpose of sandwiches was hands down the greatest lunch I have had in recent memory.
My mom does not mess around when it comes to lunch. She bought not two but four whole lobsters in order to make lobster rolls for three of us. My brother ended up sleeping on the couch for most of the afternoon so it ended up just me and her and she steamed not two but four ears of corn for us. For some reason Piz lives under the premise that at any given moment six other hungry people may come in the door demanding double portions of whatever she is serving up. This is the reason why when I go over her house for dinner every Monday night I often open the door to three pounds of chicken stirfry and 8 cups of rice, or perhaps, if we are feeling peckish a whole roast beef, baked potatoes, roasted onions, steamed spinach and a loaf of grilled foccacia bread. So we didn’t just have lobster rolls for lunch, we had one pound lobster bombs and every bite was straight ridiculous. I wish everyone to have a mom like mines, just make sure you go to the gym to compensate for her liberal use of all things saturated fat and her Cheesecake Factory-like portion sizes.
The one mistake we made with these lobster rolls was the choice of bread. A perfect lobster roll should strictly be served on a buttered, grilled hot dog roll. I think the reason for this is lobster plays second fiddle to none, so attempting to have some sort of fancy pants artisan bread or anything within a whiff of the whole grain family is pretty much a bad idea. I think my mom, in her misguided attempt to fool me this was going to be a “light” lunch purchased whole wheat Kaiser rolls for our sadwiches. The bread was too well, wheat, and it’s dense, almost molasses hinted flavor felt clunky and inappropriate next to our lobster salad. Plain hotdog rolls work because they are unchallenign to the taste buds, and therefore let the sandwich filling take center stage. That being said, I still adored these lobster bombs, we just made a mental note on the bread and had another glass of wine. Lesson learned.
LOBSTER SALAD BOMBS:
4 small lobsters, boiled and shelled. Meat broken up into large chunks
Juice of half a lemon
2 to 3 tablespoons mayonnaise
Two celery stalks, diced finely (optional)
Generous sprinkling of salt and pepper
Lobsters cook in about seven minutes. Once we had ours boiled and cooled we set to work removing them from the shells. The rich tail meat we cut into slightly more manageable chunks, the claw meat, we tried to keep as is, because nothing looks more appealing then when the lobster meat in your sandwich still holds the shape of the beast from whence it came.
Place the lobster meat in a bowl and juice your lemon over it with your free hand cupped below to catch any seeds. Add celery and just enough mayonnaise to combine. Salt and pepper liberally. Place on griddled, buttered rolls. Devour.
You could easily substitute melted butter for the mayonnaise and skip the celery. Some people think celery in lobster salad is an abomination, but I say personal preference reigns. Since my mom had shelled out the dough for the lobsters and she wanted celery, I rolled with it, but if I were making this again by myself, I might simply combine the lobster meat with butter and lemon and call it a day.
We served these with a simple salad and corn on the cob.
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