Larry's Fish Truck

OK, so its not a restaurant. But it IS in the North Country This Week every week, as a little advertisement for "Fresh Seafood Thursdays". Larry's Fish Truck is "at the park" from 9:30am-1pm in Canton and parked at the corner of the Market Street bypass in Potsdam, NY from 2-5:15pm every Thursday. The bypass is a road bridge that parallels the railroad bridge over the Racquette River for traffic to go around the downtown area of the tiny village of Potsdam. Going through the historic downtown or going over the river is a quaint experience, but either way, you can get to Larry's on Thursday afternoon. Well, you have to go over the river even if you go through the historic downtown, just a different bridge (two actually, but not through the woods to grandmother's house).

The Julie/Mom Project was inspired by the Julie & Julia movie, a favorite scene of which is the cooking of the live lobsters. We also watched many episodes of the original French Chef With Julia Child and a favorite is "The Lobster Show". My daughter Julie (of this blog) and her sister MJ have both been wanting to try lobster ever since. There is the "Lobster House" just three miles away from us that is in our Spring Restaurant Guide, but I have hesitated to go there any time soon, knowing how particualry expensive lobster is in a restaurant and also knowing how particularly finicky miss Maryjane is about all sorts of foods. We may get there some day.

But in the meantime, I got a better idea while noting that "live lobsters", with a cute painting of a lobster, are advertised on the side of Larry's truck along with "fresh seafood". Its still expensive, of course, but this is a very special thing to do for our blog. Larry's Fish Truck business is up for sale, too. Don't know if it will be around much longer if nobody buys it and it is very cool to be able to get our own lobsters, support a small business and do a Julia Child thing all at the same time. I hope to go down to Larry's again before I believe he stops for the season because there are all kinds of yummy things there and Julie and Mom do loooove fish! The smoked trout pate looked especially appealing, but we are partial to salmon as well. He also has oysters and just lots of stuff. I love cod which is available, though it is ironically rare in modern times as these fisheries have collapsed.

In the past, it was believed to be impossible to over-fish cod, a staple food resource for many societies and a basic for feeding slaves in the Caribbean. The science of the day did not predict the exponential effect of human population rise and technology advancements in fishing that ultimately led to exactly that outcome. Now, even with moratoriums in the Atlantic, it appears that cod may never come back to meaningful levels. The entire ecosystem has been altered too greatly by the overkill. And I've heard that lobsters used to regularly grow quite large... like up to five feet long. I've also heard that the original pilgrims that first came to America would not have come so close to starving in the winter if their cultural food avoidance prejudices did not cause them to shun lobster! But I digress...

We watched "The Lobster Show" again on Youtube and accordingly for the simple "recipe" she did, Julie and I went down and got two 1 1/2 pound lobsters. The recipe that the Julie Powell character did in the movie appeared to be Lobster Thermidor, though, after reading the recipe, it was depicted incorrectly as the lobsters for that have to be cut in half while still alive, then baked. It is a very complex recipe and, after all, this is a restaurant blog, not a cooking blog! Its also a "no rules" blog, which allows us to take this little divergence.

We boiled a big pot of water. That took a looong time. I chased the girls around the house with the live lobsters. I felt a bit guilty for that, but considering their ultimate bondage (uh, the lobsters'), it seemed pretty harmless. They really are insects of the sea... like huge cockroaches that happen to live in the ocean. But there they are... their beady little eyes looking at you. How is this different from seeing a pig in the face before you eat your bacon or seeing a cow in the eye before your tasty burger? Hmmmm? As per Julia Child's lesson, we checked to see if they were male or female. They were both males and disturbingly enough, my girls decided that this was justification enough to kill them as individuals! Shit you not. And, yes, I DID question this concept with them!

We plunged them in head first, or as Julia Child said, where all their thoughts and feelings are, so they die immediately, which we all know they do not. Their cold bodies immediately cool the rolling boiling water to less than boiling and they stay alive just a bit until the water comes back to full boil, which Julia never mentions how long will take, which is actually some time. They kick a bit... or is that just the boiling water (oh, its not boiling though)... or "nerves"? Yeah. I'd have some "nerves" if I was being boiled alive.

We took one of the lobsters to eat immediately and cooled and put the other in the refrigerator. Following "The Lobster Show" we cut the thing in half with scisssors. We had cooled it a bit anyway, so we scooped out the greenish guts for the "sauce" and the removed the leg and thoracic cavity meat. The guts get mixed with mayonnaise, dijon mustard and green onions (fresh from grandma's garden) as sauce to the rest of the meat. I find that sauce goes best with the thoracic cavity meat, that still has some guts clinging to it. I dip the tail and pitiful but delicisous leg meat into melted butter and also the huge bounty of big claw meat... possibly more delicious than the tail meat.

It was all delicious... MJ hated it. Julie and I savored it over the course of that night and a few evenings later when we did the same to the other chilled, cooked cockroach... I mean lobster. Yum.

Post Script: Julia Child's Lobster Show included a segment where you remove the "sand sack"... the stomach... of the lobster after you cut it in half. This is one of the things you doooo when you follow a Julia Child show. The firsrt (male) lobster we executed on his death row had a piece of rubber in his sac we could see before we cut the transparent stomach open. I speculate this is something that happens in lobster tankes where the only thing you might eat is a bit of rubber band off your fellow mate's claws as you starve yourself (?) cleaning out your intestinal tract much like a human awaiting their colonoscopy... don't want folks seeing the filled GIT... or culinary gods forbid... EATING a filled GI tube?!?! Anyway... after you cut open the stomach, you can see an image of a "madonna".. a woman's dressed figure with the transparent/translucent stomach lining as a gown... awe-inspiring.