Stories

From the LA Times

I ate my share of lobsters while spending summers in Rhode Island. My family still talks about the 10-pounder we bought from a shop in Galilee. We spent an hour scouring the neighborhood looking for someone who owned a pot big enough to cook it. Lobster is still one of my favorite foods of summer — that's when it is the cheapest, when they move closer to shore and the fishing conditions are better.

A good lobster is something to be relished, eaten with your hands, the buttery juices wiped from your chin and licked from your fingers.

The easiest way to cook lobster is simply boiled and then served on a picnic table spread with newspaper. Select a pot that is large enough to accommodate all the lobsters. Add enough salt to the water to approximate the salinity of the sea, about 3.5%. Add enough vinegar that the water tastes slightly acidic.

Bring the water to a boil, add the lobsters and cover the pot. The water should maintain a simmer but no more — that makes more tender meat. The general rule for cooking lobster is to allow 7 to 8 minutes per pound. I think lobster tends to be better when slightly less than fully cooked, but most people want their shellfish well done. This is totally understandable, but a hint of translucence in the flesh is not a bad thing. 

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Of course I’m as broke as the next girl, but as I was waiting for my car to get serviced, I decided to treat myself for having to suffer two hours in Santa Monica. I called a friend and she suggested Huckleberry. I had only been there one other time and the breakfast was completely fabulous, so I was excited to try it again. But on this last visit, the service was verging just on the brink of truly awful (like surprised that the people in line "actually want to order something" awful) and the ready-made salads (which are even more expensive than they are at Joan's on Third) looked as if they had been sitting out way too long and that they might not have been that great in the first place.

My mocha was still perfect – the way the Europeans and Israelis make coffee – the type of coffee that is getting harder and harder to find in LA. However, my friend ordered an iced coffee (which cost her $4 by the way) and when they brought it out (after a fifteen minute wait) it seemed a little watery. For the price of an entire meal from Trader Joe’s, this starving writer wasn't about to get skimped on her much needed afternoon coffee. She marched back in and demanded (by demanded I mean politely asked) for a less watered down coffee. The baristas confessed that they had run out of iced coffee and simply poured hot coffee over ice. They promptly made her a proper iced coffee and after bringing it out to our table told her that the milk and sugar were inside. Call me lazy, but for $4 a cup I don't want to schlep my own add-ins!

I spend a great deal of my life working functions that exceptionally wealthy people go to. My official jobs have ranged from handing out escort cards to rangling opera singers, to making emergency Staples runs, to standing and looking pretty. I’m especially good at that last one.

But my unofficial job is where I really excel: soothing the savage rich lady.

Actually, I’m pretty great with rich old men as well, but soothing the savage rich man sounds like the subject for a whole other blog, by a writer who isn’t me, and you need to buy a subscription to read it.

If any of you are considering entering into the exciting field of nonprofit fundraising, you need to learn one thing: rich ladies like it when you like their blouse. Ok, or their jewelry or their hair or their bag, but blouse is a funnier word, and relates specifically to one unfortunate such occurrence I experienced recently.

It’s officially less than one week until a global earthquake causes the entire world to shatter into pieces. I thought we had another year and a half, but subway signs—and sign holders have informed me that the true end of the world is not in December of 2012, but is creeping up on us quickly. According to subway posters and people raising awareness outside of City Hall earlier this week, the end of the world is really May 21, 2011! So now it’s time to grab your parachute and your bungee chords and try something you’ve never done before! Or, in my case, eat all types of food that I’d like to smother my taste buds with before this global earthquake officially hits. Because while some people like to live like they will be dying—I’d much rather eat like I am dying.

So let’s say this hypothetical earthquake does hit. What’s on the final week’s menu? In any ordinary situation where life didn’t have an expiration date shorter than the one printed on my recently purchased gallon of skim milk, I would be exchanging out my sweets and diving into a vegetables, taking out the juices and drowning myself in water – but this week—this hypothetical last week of life – no way.