Food Fights—no, not that kind!

Supper before cooking

So colorful

Instead of a cooking weekend, I had a food fight weekend—the food against me. Neighbor Mary found lobster at $5 each and brought me one. When I unwrapped it, I was unprepared for all the liquid that gushed forth—everywhere. Spent a lot of time mopping up. Briefly I thought the lobster was uncooked, but no—it was cooked but still in the shell. Now, generally in restaurants I’m pretty good at extricating the meat, especially that tender claw meat. But I don’t have the cracking instruments at home, nor the tiny fork to poke into shells.

I called for pliers, which immediately made Christian ask, “What’s wrong.” He laughed when I told him. No pliers—he sent Jacob with a hammer, and I watched him hammer bugs (so I thought) as he came down the walk. He said no, he was hammering acorns. They are everywhere!

Still I wasn’t at all confident of the hammer’s cleanliness, so I washed it with dish soap, then wrapped a washcloth around it and secured it with a rubber band. My first attempts just sent the claw skittering away from me, unscathed. But eventually I got the shell cracked enough to get the meat out.

Lobster salad—essentially a lobster roll without the bun—was good, but I don’t think I want to do that too often. I had a big bag of lobster trash—shells, wet paper towels, etc.—that friends kindly took to the garbage for me.

The roasted version

No nearly as colorful

Tonight’s supper is an experiment—with neighbors as guinea pigs. The entree consists of cubes of roasted vegetables and chunks of sausage, kielbasa or something similar. You toss it with olive oil and bagel seasoning mix. I never heard of the seasoning, but you can buy it at Trader Joe’s or Central Market or probably other stores. I also found an online recipe under “Everything but the Bagel Seasoning.” The prepared kind has poppy seeds in it, so I made my own and left the poppy seeds out because I don’t like them. You bake it at 400 for 20 minutes.

The vegetables I thought would be colorful are beets, carrot, Brussel sprouts, and acorn squash. I didn’t quite understand the online ordering directions for curbside pickup and ended up with one large beet, one large carrot, and more Brussel sprouts than I will eat in a month of Sundays. But my second food fight was with the squash. If it’s hard to peel a raw beet—and it is—it’s impossible to peel a raw squash. I couldn’t even cut it in half—Christian had to do that for me. I scraped out the seeds but still couldn’t peel it. Finally baked half until it was soft but not edible yet, scored it, and cut out the chunks. It may turn to mush in the baking.

The proof is in the pudding. The veggies needed longer cooking--like almost an hour--and they weren't nearly as colorful and pretty. But they were tasty and tender and the sausage was great. Another time I'll omit the Brussel sprouts. I never have really warmed to them. But this is a keeper recipe.

Fortunately my lunch easy to fix and looked colorful on the plate—it made up in color for what the cooked dinner lacked. My mom always said food is half eaten with the eye. I seem to be on a no-bagel kick, because lunch was essentially lox and

bagels without the bagel. I’m not a bagel fan anyway but I sure do love lox.