So, yeah, I thought it would be fun to make lobster dip for the Super Bowl. Or, really, I thought we’d have a Super Bowl party Sunday so that I could try to make lobster dip. I’d seen a couple of recipes, and it seemed like a fairly easy maneuver — the kind of thing I could do without a proper recipe.

Rachel was away for the weekend, eating oysters (pic below), and so I headed over to Fish Tales on Court Street, which had given us really excellent lobsters in the past. They’re on the pricey side, but usually very fresh. This time, not so much. The guy I got barely moved at all when I put him out on the kitchen table. A vague twitching of antennae was the only indication he would give. I don’t know why, but it seems sadder to cook a lobster that hasn’t just been vigorously moving around in the kitchen a few moments before — I guess a lot of people would say the opposite.

Anyhow, after he was cooked and shucked, I started combining ingredients in the blender. Like I often do, I basically approximated what I remembered of the recipes I’d seen online, not really paying as much attention to amounts of things. Take the lobster meat, add a little cayenne pepper, some light cream cheese, artichoke hearts, scallions, and Worcestershire sauce, press blend, and hope for the best.

In this case, I didn’t quite get the best. The dip wasn’t bad, objectively, but my other ingredients had completely obliterated the taste of the lobster — leaving me with a ton of dip that tasted pretty much the same as the can of Utz I could have bought for $3.

Susan from the Red Hook Lobster Pound (whose lobsters we’ve not yet tried, but will in the very near future) writes that my problem was probably lack of lobster concentration: “You would really need to make a very reduced lobster stock to add in order to make any cream base taste like lobster.”

Anyhow, here’s Rachel and her oysters. She seemed to have better luck with her project than I did with mine.

photo by Grant Cornett