Erica De Mane

Recipe in text below: Warm Lobster and Sweet Pepper Salad with Pine Nuts and Basil

Merry Christmas, everyone. I’m assuming most of you have started thinking about what you want to make for your big dinner. Christmas Eve is my big dinner. I don’t have a set menu. I make different things every year. Seafood and vegetables and citrus fruit, in various configurations. This year I’m drawn to lobster.

For about 25 years now, off and on, I’ve been strongly attracted to a photo of lobster with roasted sweet peppers in Julia Della Croce’s book Antipasti. I have imagined how it would taste, sweet and rich, but until now I never made the dish. Why? I don’t know. But that just changed. I gave it a try, and it’s worth it.  Now it’s on my menu for Christmas Eve.

Her recipe is spare. No onion, no garlic. She doesn’t even add salt. She wants you to taste the lobster and the roasted pepper unobstructed. That seems noble, but it isn’t a comfortable place for me, so I added some shallot, sweet vermouth, and a garnish of pine nuts, and some salt. I don’t think they were a mistake. If you’d like to try my version, here’s what I did:

I  boiled two 1 ½ pound lobsters for 11 minutes. That timing proved right for fully cooked but moist, tender meat. I let the lobsters cool for a bit and then pulled out all their meat, cutting it into chunks and sticking in a bowl, adding a sprinkling of salt, and drizzling it with a little good olive oil.

I roasted two red bell peppers over flames until they blackened, and then I skinned them and sliced them into thick strips. I sautéed the strips briefly with a few slices of shallot, a little olive oil, salt, and a pinch of sugar, adding a splash of sweet vermouth at the end.

When I was ready to serve the dish, I added the lobster meat to the pan with the roasted peppers and very gently and quickly reheated everything until it was just warmed through. I  arranged it all on a serving platter and drizzled on my best olive oil and some lemon juice.  A scattering of toasted pine nuts and a garnish of fresh basil finished the dish. Really nice. It will serve four as an antipasto offering, and you can easily double it to feed a bigger crowd.

Lobster does seem Christmasy to me, primarily I think because it turns bright red when you cook it. Cooked lobsters look good draped with those mini, multi-colored Christmas lights that are usually wrapped around the mini-Christmas trees you find in really small New York apartments. It’s interesting to see how many artists are attracted to lobsters. There are loads of lobster still lifes from across history. Here are three I particularly like: