Our Easter meal was a comparative breeze

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After my wife and son mutinied and refused to order from the Passover menu at Rosa Mexicano, assembling an Easter dinner the next day was easy.

When I ate meat, we'd buy a ham as the centerpiece of the meal, but my 13-year-old son wanted lobster, so my wife went to ShopRite after church. 

But live lobster, usually on sale for $4.99 or $5.99 a pound, was selling for $8.99 a pound on Sunday. My wife called, and when she told me the price, I said I was leaving to buy a ham at Whole Foods Market, a couple of miles away in Paramus.

I found just what I was looking for: A boneless, fully cooked Applewood Smoked Uncured Petite Ham from the Niman Ranch -- pork raised with "no antibiotics ever, no added hormones ever and all vegetarian feeds." It was $7.99 a pound, and weighed about a pound and a half.

I heated up the ham in the oven and found the rest of the ingredients at home -- hand-trimmed French green beans from Costco that needed only steaming and seasoning, and white rice, which I prepared in a rice cooker with Badia-brand Sazon Tropical to make it yellow (no MSG).

My Easter dinner? Old Farmhouse Vegetable Stew, also from Costco, and a big salad with beets, tomato, and some of those steamed green beans. 

I wanted a light meal after over-indulging the night before at the Mexican restaurant.

Cooking lobster is no fun

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We love lobster, but prepare it at home only occasionally. It's one of the only times you have to kill something that is alive to eat it. So we substitute lobster ravioli or splurge and eat it out once in a while.


My wife and son wanted to take me out to a restaurant in the city for Father's Day, but the couple of places I was interested in were booked solid. So I asked my wife to buy lobsters at ShopRite in Englewood for dinner last night.


She came home with two lobsters weighing a total of nearly 8 pounds ($5.99 a pound with a PriceClub card). In the past, we have had trouble finding pots large enough for big lobsters, but I knew that for Thanksgiving last year, I bought a big, rectangular turkey roaster with a cover that would swallow the large crustaceans.


The lobsters had been packed in a plastic bag, which I had to cut open. They seemed to be rearing away from my rubber-gloved hand, and the big claws on each were nearly as big as my hand. I had to lift them out by their claws -- I couldn't get my hand in the thick rubber glove around the bodies.

I've seen lobsters dispatched with the thrust of a knife; I can't stomach that. The water in the roaster was boiling, but wasn't deep enough for me to plunge the lobsters in head first, as the instructions on the bag recommend. I placed them inside in opposite directions, and quickly put on the cover. Thrashing went on for a few minutes and then all I noticed was steam escaping. 


I cooked them for 20 minutes.


We ate our lobsters with linguine in oil and garlic and crushed red pepper, with fresh, chopped parsley from the garden. There was lots of delicious lobster meat that needed only a squeeze of fresh lemon juice. I also dipped some in the pasta's garlicky oil. I drank wine. My wife and son were delighted. The kitchen was a mess.