Weekend Gorging: When Petunia Wasn’t Looking

In between attempts to feed much-needed medicine to wiggly fur face residents, we celebrated the gift of life that is our cat by eating lots of good things, including these guys.

When your personal chef for life wakes up on a Saturday morning and declares (while cleaning out the magazine holder stuffed with six months worth of cooking magazines) that he feels like making something, you don’t argue. And, for some reason, XFE felt like making lobster rolls.

But first, we had to drag out our large lobster pot. Because, yes, even though neither of us is from New England, and we’ve never made lobster rolls, we have a specially-designated lobster pot. (We have made lobsters before. And crab boil.)

We still have no gas in our house. I know, right? So our house is (was?) all electric, including the stove. This does not work for us, so we had a gas line run into the kitchen for a stove, and we swapped out the electric stove for a gas one. We got all our permits from the city, filled out all the paperwork with the gas company and now ….well, nothing.

Our gas line has protruded from the front of our house uselessly since we moved in late July. We need the gas company (or their subcontractors or whatever) to come and connect it to the main gas line under the street. In the meantime, large pots of water will be boiled outside. We’re seriously hoping we have a stove by winter.

Eventually they came in like this. Well, they had bodies, but this picture is post-body removal.

And the lobster gods got really angry and turned the sky into this (actually, there was a tornado warning for our area. I even got a phone text! Not from the lobsters, I don’t think. More probably from the weather service or the city or something. Lot’s of excitement).

We went a bit crazy on the ingredients front. We added green onions AND chives (living wild up in the OT). American chives are apparently not from America. They’re from Israel.

As I said, we went crazy with the ingredients. Besides Israeli-grown American chives, we added celery, mayo, and, of course, sriracha. Which is why it’s a weird peachy color. We cannot resist sriracha. We’re hardly lobster roll purists. We realize this was a pretty bastardized version.

Served on a crusty buttered french roll with a side of grilled corn and a nice white wine. The lobsters gave up their lives for a tasty cause. Actually, we both agreed we’d gotten too crazy with the mayo and sriracha and we’d probably leave those off next time (or at least use less).

Also on Saturday, before the lobster massacre and the tornado, I accompanied my friend Katie to some torture session called LA Kickboxing. It was one hour of pure hell. While it is very motivating to have an incredibly strong young man yell at you and threaten you with push ups, his penchant for burpees and squat jumps guarantee that our relationship will probably not go much further.

BUT, since I had almost died doing that, I figured I could do whatever the hell I wanted for the rest of the weekend. Including eating delicious chicken wings while watching the Red Zone.

XFE made two kinds of wings on the grill: Old Bay coated wings, and a new (and welcome) contender to the kickboxing ring: sriracha wings. They were amazing. Even more amazing than stumbling into a Starbucks after an hour of kickboxing and gulping down a mocha light frappaccino. Not that anyone did that. Or something.

So weekend lessons: cat medicine, always, always bad.

Poe and kickboxing: Mostly bad but a good excuse to eat too much.

Lobster and sriracha: good in moderation.

Chicken wings with sriracha: a match made in heaven.

I feel smarter already.