apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Bummer! You may have to ask your neighbors if you can start (organically) treating the tree with something so that you can have a good harvest next year.

Anyone else have a good story of star-crossed culinary exploits to share? We could use the company...

....The time: 1990. The place: my parents' house. The participants: me (then 19) and my then-boyfriend (26), with my father making a phone-in appearance.

The backstory: I'm home from college on winter break. The rest of my family -- parents and younger brother -- have head up to New Hampshire for a week for a ski trip. I'm not a big ski-er, so I stay behind -- besides, this also gives me a chance for "quality time" with my boyfriend, who goes to college in my hometown so we rarely get alone time. At the time of this story, they've only been gone one day.

I decided to have my boyfriend over for a fancy dinner; my parents do not know about this, because it'll just be the two of us and everything will be fine because I'll clean up afterward, and really, it's not a big deal...as the star dish, I select something called "Dublin Lawyer", an Irish seafood dish which requires poaching lobster meat in a whiskey-laced cream sauce and then flambee'ing it.

I thought this sounded easy. I picked up all the ingredients -- including the live lobster -- and came back home to get to work. My boyfriend was meeting me there to help me cook.

You'll note I said "live lobster". For this lobster had to be killed by stabbing it in the back of the head.

...I couldn't kill the lobster. I just handed my boyfriend the knife and the lobster and retreated to the other end of the kitchen squealing, 'KILL IT! KILL IT!" and hiding my eyes. While I kept my eyes shut, I heard several sickening crunching noises, and then he finally announced he was done.

....And we set to work trying to take the meat out of the shell. Now. I spent a lot of time on Cape Cod as a kid, and my only experience with lobster consisted of the already-steamed kind where the meat slipped easily out of the shell. This....wasn't as easy. We spent the next hour or so ripping and tearing the shell apart, trying to peel whatever meet we could away from the thing; occasionally some last nerve would make something on the carcass twitch, and I'd again shriek and cower across the kitchen again squealing, "AAAAAH! KILL IT! KILL IT!" And he'd whack it with the knife again a few times.

Finally we were left with about a cup's worth of raw lobster meat. I looked at it. It looked like a hell of a small amount compared to the amount of cream and whiskey the recipe called for. I double-checked everything -- yep, right size lobster, yep, right measurements for everything else. I shrugged and went ahead, both of us deciding to leave the lobster mess where it was and worry about that later.

Somehow we managed NOT to burn anything down while flambeeing things. But it did make alot of smoke.

The recipe said that when you were done flameeing it, you then needed to pack the meat back into the two halves of the lobster shell and serve it that way. But this was still....soupy. REALLY soupy. We stared at it, and then just decided to serve it in bowls.

We retired to the dining room. Sat down. Both took a taste. And recoiled at the taste of whiskey soup with a hint of lobster seasoning.

And at that precise moment, the phone rang. I got up to answer it.

"Hi, Sweetie, it's your father, calling, what's up?"

"Oh, nothing," I lied. "What's going on with you guys?"

"Well," Dad said, "there's a big of a change of plan...your mother fell and broke her wrist, so we're actually on our way home right now."

I froze. I stared at the kitchen, which still had a big of a smoky haze to it and was festooned with dead lobster bits. "uh....gee. Uh, gee, that's too bad, uh....how long will you be getting here?"

"Oh, maybe a couple hours, we just got into Massachusetts."

"Good. Uh -- I mean, uh, that's too bad for Mom...uh, see you when you get in."

I hung up, my boyfriend and I frantically cleaned the entire kitchen, made Kraft mac-n-cheese from the box, and I sent him home.

Sad, I only hope whoever stole them the other years experienced the same disappointment.

Oh, empresscallipygos! That's such a classic story! And I definitely give you props - At 19, I don't think I would have had the mental fortitude to even ATTMEPT a recipe that involved both a live lobster AND flambee-ing! Actually, I'm not sure I even have the mental fortitude now... :)

who said they stole them? Geez...

If your neigbor is willing to let you treat the tree, and you're willing to spend the time, check out www.gardensalive.com. they have the best organic products. We had an old apple tree that was producing the ugliest, runtiest, infested apples. No one had done anythign to it in 20 years. We started using the recommended combination of products from gardens alive and the following year got a harvest of huge, perfect, rot and insect free apples.

Eve... check out the first quince post... then decide.
Sure seemed like stealing to me.

I have a quince tree and we are remodeling our kitchen right now so I will not be able to make use of them. I'd be happy to send them to you. I haven't cut them open to look at them, but I can do that tonight. I'm not sure if there is a way for you to contact me through my AT log in. I will check back in the comment section for this post.
BTW - I have had people take our quinces without asking as well. The tree is in my fenced front yard so they had to open my front gate to sneak in and get them.

Yikes! Like something from a horror movie. I'm delighted you didn't try to salvage bits of those. Too bad you spent all that time and energy picking them. My only tale of a garden snafu was the year a chayote vine "escaped" the garden, and ran up a very tall pine tree with all of my Dad's squash. He considered asking a friend who drove a cable TV truck to hoist him up in the cherry-picker to retrieve a few, but thought better of it.

Mich208 - Thanks for the offer of quinces! I'm still hoping to score a basket of quinces from a farm here in Massachusetts, so I should be all set. Hopefully you can find a quince-loving neighbor to share them with!