Amazing Lobster Sauce

Recently, a Henry's Farmers Market opened up in our neighborhood and we finally went in a couple of weeks ago. They had these spiny lobster tails on sale for $5/each so we got two. I wasn't quite sure what to do with them and just tucked them in the freezer. Last week, I bought TJ's lobster ravioli and thought those tails would add something special to the ravioli.

We've had the ravioli several times before with just pasta sauce from a jar. Since we were having them with real lobster, I wanted to utilize all of the lobster (i.e., the shells) so did a search on lobster sauce recipes. All my searching resulted in recipes that seemed very time-consuming and required more steps than I had skill to do, so I decided to take the essence of those recipes and create my own secret weapon short-cut: pasta sauce in a jar! My resourcefulness paid off with a very tasty end-product. Ken likes it more than the white wine sauce for fish.

• 2-4 lobster tails, depending on size & budget (we had 2 & subsidized with langostinos; shrimp works, too)
  
• 1 package TJ's lobster ravioli
• 1/2 cup rustico sauce
• 1/4 cup cream
• 1/2 cup dry sherry
• 3 tbsp unsalted butter
• 1/2 cup sliced mushrooms
  

1. Start by steaming the lobster. Place the tails into a shallow bowl, then the bowl into a stir-fry pan with about 1/2 cup of water underneath the bowl, cover and steam for about 8 minutes.
2. Once the tails lose their translucency, remove and plunge into ice water to stop cooking and quickly cool the lobster. Pull out the meat from the shells and set aside. Save the shells. There should be lobster water in the bowl that held the tails. Set that aside.
3. Melt about 2 tbsp of butter in the stir-fry pan and saute the shells until reduced, then add the lobster water from the steaming process and reduce again.
4. Deglaze with sherry and reduce.
5. Add the cream and once it comes to a boil, add the pasta sauce until it comes to a boil and reduce the heat to a simmer, stirring occasionally.
6. Meanwhile, in a separate pan, melt 1 tbsp of butter, add the mushrooms and saute until tender. Add about 2 tbsp of sherry and saute until the sherry evaporates and the mushrooms caramelize. Add mushrooms to the sauce.
7. Simmer this sauce for about another 15 minutes or so. The ravioli only takes about 5 minutes to boil, so wait until you're ready to eat to cook it.
8. As the ravioli's cooking, turn off the heat to the sauce, remove the lobster shells and add the lobster meat. Keep pan covered until the ravioli's done, then it's time to eat!

This sauce is amazingly full of lobster flavor, and it took about 30 minutes to make rather than the 1 hour or so, and with a lot less effort. When I first added the rustico sauce, I thought I had ruined the whole thing because the sauce was so strong, but the flavors mellowed out after some simmering. It was so good I wanted to lick the bowl! Let me know what you think if you get a chance to try this. And if you have an easy way to make lobster bisque, I'd like to hear about that as well.

Hamburgers!

We celebrated Ken's birthday today and he wanted hamburgers. Amazingly, after years of grilling up meats, this is the first time I have ever done hamburgers. We bought pre-cut patties from Costco that still needed to be formed into burgers this morning--so fresh we had to wait for them to come out of the grinder and packaged! After squishing them down to about 2/3 inch flat round discs, the only other thing I did was to lightly season them with garlic salt.

Some patties came out bigger than others, which worked out perfectly since some of us ate less than others. After about 6 minutes on one side, I flipped the patties over and at the same time added the buns to the upper grill rack to cook for about another 4 minutes before adding a slice of Muenster cheese to each patty. As soon as the cheese melted, the burgers were ready. I sandwiched each patty between buns and let our guests build their own burgers with the usual fixings.

*We had them for dinner again the next night and I made a wasabi aioli for mine.

Linguini & Eggs Update

I had the brilliant idea to add pre-made pesto sauce from Costco into the beaten eggs before topping the noodles, and the result was pretty darn tasty. The pesto sauce was already salted so seasoning the noddles with salt was not really necessary. We had it with salmon as our extra protein. Too bad there wasn't any ham on hand, then we could've had green eggs and ham!

21 April 2010 Update
Here it is again (pictured above) in the pesto sauce with whole wheat linguine, wilted spinach & sauteed asparagus, Louisiana hot links and garlic shrimp. Yeah, I know that's a lot of ingredients...trying to use up the odds & ends.

Grilled Pork Chops

Total yummy goodness with Yoshida's marinade. I love the simplicity of grilled food. This portion was for two, not one.

IKEA Sauce & Baked Cherry Tomatoes

Another cool-looking baked fish dish, this time with just some garlic salt. I found this chive sauce at IKEA (there was a picture of salmon on the package so I couldn't help myself), which turned out okay after adding some half-and-half instead of the suggested margerine. We happened to have some fresh chives on hand, which I used to top off. The best part of the meal were the sugar snap peas and cherry tomatoes. The peas were steamed then stir fried with a little garlic salt. I wrapped the tomatoes in wax paper, added grape seed oil and garlic salt, then baked it alongside the fish. They turned out perfectly juicy and full of flavor. I just loved how everything looked together.

Baked Cod & Zucchini "Pasta"

I recently bought a julienne tool and thought I'd try something different on the zucchini by making it look like noodles. The fish was baked in soy sauce with julienned green onions and ginger. This was a very light meal and looked pretty cool.

Ranch Mashed Potatoes

I made these mashed potatoes tonight to accompany leftover market-roasted chicken, which I remade by adding gravy. I didn't actually read the recipe, but made it from memory of an episode of Rachel Ray's 30 Minute Meals. Although it may have been too overloaded with herbs and runny when I first took it off the heat, the flavor and consistency eventually rounded out and we both really enjoyed it. I forgot the hot sauce, which didn't make a difference since we're not into spicy. One suggestion: go easy on the dill.

Chicken Sausage & Bow Ties

So simple it's not really cooking, but I wanted to share it anyway because it looked so pretty! (This picture looks cloudy because steam was coming off of the plate.) Add the following to a pan in the following order and simmer:

• about 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
  
• 3 links spicy chicken sausage, sliced then browned
  
• 1 medium & 1 small heirloom tomatoes, diced (or whatever you have on hand)
  
• 1/2 small container TJ's sun-dried tomato pesto
• 1/4 cup white wine
  
• chopped basil

The last part is to mix the sauce with about a cup of bow tie pasta and you're ready to eat!

Ground Pork 3 Ways

1. Stuffed into cucumber rings (combined w/ garlic salt & chopped cilantro; best steamed)
2. Browned & simmered in soy sauce w/ garlic & shitake mushrooms; served over rice
3. Take #2 and saute w/ green beans & some more soy sauce

My mom brought over some ground pork and a cucumber a few days ago for the purpose of making the stuffed cucumbers, but they never got made and left the ingredients here, so I had to use them up before they went bad. There was more than enough pork left over after the cucumbers were stuffed, so I figured why not make the most out of them. There's still about half of the meat left, which I froze for future use.

Hmmm....meat cupcakes?

La Jolla

We were down in La Jolla this weekend and ate at this yummy (and spendy) place, called the Whisk & Laddle. We had actually eaten here once before with my parents and sister, so when Ken told me we were headed to La Jolla, I couldn't wait to eat there again. Like before, we shared a charcuterie plate, which included 3 different types of salamis, 3 artisan cheeses, tampanade, whole-seed mustard sauce, seasoned almonds, cornichons, and the most delicious vine-ripened raisins. I had the mussels in a white wine broth with a fries, and Ken had a shrimp pesto pasta. That broth was so dangerouly good that I asked for extra bread to sop it all up. Honestly, I would've just picked it up and drank the whole thing, but that would've been uncouth and overkill.

I also had breakfast with a college friend and unfortunately, I forgot the name of the place. It was a cute little cottage in a fantastic location, nicely situated across the street from the ocean, so we had a great view of the cove where these people were SCUBA diving and snorkeling. We both had iced lattes and the lump crab Ipanema (Benedicts style with a chili sauce rather than Hollandaise). Funny thing was that, my eggs turned out runny--the way I liked them--and Tracy's turned out more cooked--the way she liked them. What are the chances?