Thursday October 23, 2025 Lobsters Are Crustaceans

Mikinaak Creek had just enough water in it on October 23, 2025 to cast a reflection of the white spruce trees across the creek that a friend and I planted in 1974. The ongoing drought in Palmville Township, in the NW part of the state, has taken its toll here. The creek banks are 4-5 feet high as a result. This portion of the creek is often a lake. Recent rains of two inches total barely made a dent.

This is an old almanac post of several years ago. Please bear with me. Thank you.  

 

Ever try to boil two frozen lobsters on a barbecue grill in your backyard?  I use an old two-burner utilitarian barbecue grill, several times a week, but I never have attempted boiling lobster on it until just the other day.

   The frozen lobsters lay in a dish on top of the outside central air conditioner hoping for rescue by a fox or large rodent bent on a sea food dinner. They had been in our freezer amid an unchanging landscape of frozen loaves of bread, venison sausage, three pizzas, and some old freezer-burnt ice cream for months. My wife, tired of having to keep moving them to get at other foodstuffs, kept pestering me to cook them; and I, just as relentless, kept putting it off because I doubted they'd turn out very good. (I can grill and steak or hamburger, but lobster seemed an alien life form to me here in western Palmville; eastern Palmville sure; western Palmville, not on your life.

Okay, so I relented, and finally fired up the grill with both the burners on high. A half hour later, the burner almost white-hot, nary a bubble met my eye. The water refused to boil. "The asparagus and scalloped potatoes are done, Hon! How much longer will it be, you think?” my wife inquired again, as she and her daughter busied themselves in the kitchen periodically watching the ending of Hotel Budapest, a video I’ve never seen in its entirety, entirely.

   “Well, between the wind blowing the burner out, and me turning the grill backwards against the wind, and me dragging the grill up the hill to the south side of the house to get out of the wind, then removing the ‘diverter’ to get more heat, then lowering the lid over the pot - - I can see a couple two or three bubbles on the bottom. Won’t be long now!” I replied confidently, although the daughter’s dog saw through my false bravado, and tried to take advantage of my weakened mental state. I peeled him off my leg, the tosser.

    We had planned to share the lobsters with our friend Joe, a seafood lover of some renown being as he’s from Beantown and all; but he was away on another ‘holiday’ as they call their runaway excursions to all points of the world, this one included a luncheon date with a longtime Broadway-actress friend performing in “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” on-stage in the Twin Cities, in addition to some wine and pottery shop tours over the days to follow.

   I doubted he had really looked forward to dining over formerly-frozen seafood with the likes of us anyway, especially in such an experimental state this was. I think he’d prefer that we perfected our technique on our time, not his, so the mess was limited to our kitchen and countertops, not as charred fin-flakes and crustacean armor scattered across a sky-blue plastic serving plate, as it turned out later, but let’s not get ahead of the story. Where was I?

Our friend Joe, a seafood lover of some local renown ships his clams and lobsters in fresh from the sea.

    “You can use this timer, dear,” my wife said sweetly, as though I was doing some rare event (and I was). There's old adage is that a man has never been shot doing dishes. I think (hope) the same goes for doing some cooking for others, beside himself. I don’t do a lot of it nor am I especially good at it, but since I’m the primary eater of the household (my wife exists on a special diet of round wooden toothpicks and small-grain sea salt) I try to do my share of the meat cooking even if my only technique consists of repeating to myself, “Just a few more minutes . . “