Posts Tagged ‘lobster’

I’ve seen a couple of restaurants offering a fruits der mer platter recently, so thought i would give it a crack myself. The name is French and translates to “fruits of the sea”. It typically consists of a mix of shellfish, served over ice.

Mine included a lobster, cut in half down the middle, a crab, crayfish, prawns in the shell, muscles and clams. All of it was bought live from the fish market. I am not normally a lobster fan, but serving it on ice worked really well.

The downside of serving it all on ice is that it created a very slippy base: when carrying the platter the whole array of food slid from side to side, and I even lost a prawn or two moving it to the table.

I served it with two mayonnaises. This was not the plan, but my first one turned out too thin, so I did a second one. I also did a gribiche sauce, which is the pale one in the bowl and a honey mustard sauce (bottom left).

I won’t be doing it again in a hurry: it was too much of a hassle.

While in Anglesey we went for lunch at The Lobster Pot. I had the lobster, surprisingly. I don’t think lobster is that good, in general. It is like a very large over-sized prawn, which is fine, but maybe not as good as just having some lovely juicy prawns. However, it improved a lot with their expert hand in preparing it.

Everyone’s food looked good. I think I could have easily traded dishes with most people. Elina had curried mussels and I was most disappointed when she ate them all.

January was fish month, which really meant seafood month. As a result, we ate our way through a lot of shellfish too. Unfortunately, I’m not hipster enough to take a photo of every single dish I eat, but here are some thoughts.

We made the mistake of trying lobster again. It is disappointing every time. The taste is fine. But it is so expensive. For what is essentially a giant prawn that you have to smash your way into yourself.

Dressed crab. Boil your crab, scoop the meat out and use the shell as a miniature serving platter. I used velvet crabs. I wouldn’t recommend them. The flavour was okay but there was almost no brown meat on them. They were both about the same size, but one yielded much more meat than the other: the is a big difference between freshly malted vs old shells (you want the latter).

My kilogram of mussels turned out to be 10% stone.

Why Not Eat Insects? is a 1885 book by Vincent M. Holt. Surprisingly enough, it is a book advocating the consumption of insects. And why not? They are nutritious, tasty and plentiful.

He starts off by tackling the prejudice against eating them. We think it is a weird yet people all over the world do it. We worry that they will have fed on the wrong stuff, but this is unfounded. Most insects are vegetarians. Compare this to pigs. They will eat anything. Lobsters too. Lobsters are often caught wild and so you have no idea what they have eaten; putrified dead fish being one of their favourite meals.

He then goes on to suggest how to catch, prepare and cook a variety of insects including snails, moths, woodlice, caterpillars and others. He even concludes with some sample menus you could use for a dinner party!

It’s quite a small book; I got through the entire thing in about 45 minutes. It is also a reproduction and suffers from some flaws in the process, so is perfectly readable.