The Birthday Boy
I don't usually write much about my hubby, but Friday was his birthday and I had a brain storm to do a special dinner for him. I like to go out to eat when ever I can but honestly I have been pretty busy and really haven't done a whole lot of noteable cooking lately. So to make up for my working way too much, I wanted to make him something special.

I work in the Seafood dept. of a local chain grocery store and I see what comes and goes and when it's fresh and when it's teetering on the edge of gross. Hubby loves seafood and what luck I can actually get some...what are the odds? So after work on Friday and a new client interview for the Personal Chef side of the business I went back to the store and picked up dinner. Hubby thought we were just going to cook some Brats on the grill and have a simple dinner. I hadn't bought him a card or a gift; no time. Dinner will make up for everything and score me a tired foot rub to be determined at a later date.

We are pretty simple eaters there at home and we are not really fussy folks but I do try to do some new things for the blog every now and then. I have done this dinner before but not in a very long time because of the expense. Time was small but money was big. After it was all said and done we might have been able to go out to eat this sort of thing cheaper. Oh well, I still have stock in a lovely tired foot rub.

So here is dinner...

This is the salad-baby spinach, yellow tomatoes, shredded carrots, slice cucumbers and sliced red bell peppers. I picked the yellow tomatoes because I thought they would look nice with the deep red from the bell pepper and the dark green of the baby spinach.

I tried to bake some really HUGE potatoes but in the end, stuck them in the microwave to finish them.
This is the main course, but of course! Nothing is better than a nice piping hot red Maine lobster dipped in heart clogging melted butter! Ask my husband, and he will swear this is true as the butter runs down his chin and his eyes roll up in the back of his head showing his total delight.

This is the finished product. I took two live lobsters and put them into a pot of boiling water. I don't boil them, I steam them. There is a steamer insert in this large pot. I also use a lid with something heavy on the top of it to keep the lid from coming off. You already can guess why, so I won't go into anymore detail about that. I sprinkle OldBay on the lobsters and they are perfectly steamed after about 5-8 minutes. Our lobsters weighted 1.61 and 1.64 so they went closer to 8 minutes.

We topped off the dinner with a really cold bottle of Tomahawk Mills Vidal Blanc. I had forgotten it was in the wine refrigerator but hubby found it when I mentioned I forgot to pick a bottle for dinner. We got really lucky with this one. We bought about 4 or 5 bottles at the Town Pointe Wine Festival in downtown Norfolk, Virginia, in October of last year. We try to attend every year to discover new wines that are Virigina grown. This was a gem and sadly I don't remember how much we paid for it, but it was well worth it.


This is the casual (lazy) way of setting the birthday dinner table. We were just so excited that I cooked we didn't care about all the foo-foo stuff, just good eats! Notice the size of the spud on the dinner plate closest to these words. It takes up half the plate and neither one of us finished it.
I think dinner was a success and I got that foot rub!