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[claredalton]

Madeira-sauteéd lobster over angel-hair pasta

This recipe by Linda Greenlaw goes back to 2005, as reported on the Today show website. But Sam Reece generously shared it with us after she served it to Miklos on the island, and he raved about it. I don’t know where I was that day, but I missed it! This was in pre-pandemic times, but we hunted it down again today after Steve Palmer came down to the house and gifted us four shedders, already cooked.

This season Steve has been fishing lobster, as crew for Bruce Fernald. The season is coming to an end. November is when most of the older fishermen bring in their traps, haul their boats out, and spend the next three months off the water. There’s still work to be done painting buoys, mending traps, maintaining equipment, coiling rope. But there’s also time for other projects, and even, for some, travel to a warmer part of the country for the worst of winter.

There are many who will be grateful when Steve is done fishing, since he’s also the island’s only mechanic, and a magician with the island’s rather idiosyncratic collection of older cars, boats, golf carts and garden machinery. I imagine there’ll be quite a queue of eager customers when he’s ready to take them on.

We prevailed on Steve to replace the starter in our 1994 Geo Tracker in September, after Miklos hurt his back, and we could no longer just abandon it whenever and wherever it refused to cooperate, and walk home, hoping it would be in better humor the next day. Which it often was, especially when encouraged with a little tap from an iron rod we kept the back. The starter had been temperamental since the spring, and we’d been on Steve’s list, but he was fishing. I suspect we jumped the queue ….

The recipe is rather decadent, but incredibly tasty.

Ingredients:

4 ounces butter

4 tablespoons olive oil

1 tablespoon yellow onion

4 large garlic cloves

4 cups lobster meat

1/2 cup madeira or medium-dry sherry

1/2 teaspoon sea salt

1/2 teaspoon black pepper

1 pound angel hair or other thin-strand pasta

Directions:

Heat the butter and oil in a large, wide skillet

Add the onion and cook over medium heat until softened, about 5 minutes.

Add the garlic and lobster meat, and cook, stirring, for 3 to 4 minutes.

Add 1/4 cup of the madeira and cook for 1 minute to burn off the alcohol.

Add the remaining 1/4 cup of madeira, and season the sauce to taste with salt and pepper.

Meanwhile, cook the pasta in a large pot of boiling salted water until al dente, about 8 minutes.

Drain.

Reheat the sauce if necessary, spoon over the pasta, toss if desired, and serve. If you are feeling a little guilty about all the butter, make sure to make a big green salad as well.

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Crumpets, and leftovers, and more about failure

If you are nurturing a starter, then every time you feed it, to sustain it, you are directed to discard some of it - because you don’t want to ‘feed’ more than you are going to use. When you use your starter to make a levain, and then bake a bread, you have leftovers - of both starter and levian. If, like me, you have trouble throwing good things away, then you will go looking for ways to use those discards, and leftovers.

Enter the British crumpet. Flat and well browned on the bottom, intriguingly pockmarked and holey on the top, chewy in the middle. When toasted, positioned to receive butter that will melt through those holes, and then a slathering of Marmite, if you are a true wartime British baby, or jam or marmalade if not.

As one of those true wartime babies, who still has Marmite in the cupboard, making crumpets felt like the perfect solution to the leftover problem, when I found a recipe for them on King Arthur’s website.

BUT, the recipe was deceptive in one important respect. Even after I ordered the requisite muffin rings online, I couldn’t get the crumpets to ‘set’ on top before the bottoms burnt beyond redemption, leaving the middles just a bit too chewy. And in that partly overdone and partly underdone state, they also weren’t detaching properly from their rings. Was the pan too hot? Did I need more oil? 

It was tempting to give up. But the internet is a wonderful thing. When I googled ‘why do my crumpets burn on the bottom?’ I found a fabulous entry by Olivia Potts, aka ‘The Vintage Chef,’ on the UK’s Spectator/Life site. She is not using left over starter for her crumpets, so her recipe is different, but, like me, she struggled to avoid burning their bottoms. And her accidental solution was to use less mixture per crumpet. Eureka! Less time needed to cook the babies through, and therefore less time for the bottoms to burn. 

I haven’t actually put this insight to the test, but I’m confident enough to share it, and the recipe, here.

One other note: it is the baking soda in the recipe that eventually gives the crumpets their distinctive holes on top. It acts twice: once when added to the other ingredients in the batter, and again when exposed to the heat. You can let the batter rest up to fifteen minutes, and the soda will still activate as the crumpets cook.

Ingredients:

1 cup sourdough starter, unfed/discard

1 teaspoon sugar

1/4 to 1/2 tsp salt

2/3 tsp baking soda (or a little more if your starter is particularly sour)

Directions:

Place your starter in a medium-sized bowl. Stir in the sugar and salt, then the baking soda. the batter will rise up and bubble a bit, becoming almost billowy.

Heat a griddle or non-stick pan over medium-low heat. Grease the surface with oil on a paper towel, and then melt a pat of butter on top of the oil

Grease four muffin rings (approx. 4 inches across) and place them on the griddle or pan. Let them heat through. Pour about 1/8 of a cup of the mixture into each ring. Cook until the tops are set and full of small holes. Flip the crumpets over, check that the bottoms are a dark brown but not burnt, remove the rings (they should (!) come off easily), and continue to cook until the tops are golden. Repeat with the remaining mixture - cleaning the rings and regreasing them as needed. 

Enjoy the crumpets warm, spread with butter and your choice of Marmite or jam! Or toast to brown and crisp before serving. They can be stored at room temperature for several days, and then should definitely be toasted before enjoying.