By JOSH RESNEK
I eat lobster once or twice a year.
When lobster rolls weren’t $30 – $50 as they are today, I used to enjoy them a half dozen times a year.
I have lost much of my fascination with lobster. The higher prices are one thing. My desire for lobster going down is another.
I don’t know what it is. lobster just doesn’t turn me on as a food treat the way it used to.
That being said, I was invited with my wife to a best friend’s home for a late afternoon lobster treat on July 3.
Frankly, I was looking forward to it as I hadn’t eaten lobster since last year.
Please keep in mind, our best friend is what my late father would have called “well to do.” She lives very comfortably in a large home down the street from mine.
Despite having millions of dollars on hand, she is a Market Basket devote, with an eye always on saving money, cutting expenses, buying food at the right price, and on and on.
She would rather cut her arms off than pay $49.95 a pound for lobster meat out of the shell. I share her general feeling about that, by the way.
I mean, can you imagine spending $100 for two pounds of lobster! I can’t.
But at Market Basket, if you are willing to buy whole lobsters, they were being sold over the long weekend for $8.99 a pound – which means the four of us could eat a lobster dinner on the Fourth of July weekend for about $50.
At Market Basket, they boil the lobsters for you. You take them home. You serve them with some melted butter.
Voila! A lobster dinner at $8.99 on the plate!
The Market Basket lobsters were sweet, succulent, and tender and when pieces of lobster were briskly and momentarily marinated with hot melted butter and then tossed into my mouth – well – it was on this Fourth July a real rush for me and for everyone else at the table.
Served with potato salad, and a special salad of watermelon bits and feta cheese, and finished off with a pair of British treats – lemon butter cake and chocolate butter cake from a bakery in Newport (where my wife had spent the weekend with a friend), well, it really doesn’t get much better than this, does it?
Oh yes. I forgot. A bit of champagne helped.
The moral to this story – you can buy a pound of lobster meat for $50 and try to spread it out between four people and die of starvation or you can buy whole lobsters at Market Basket for $8.99 a pound and serve four people for a memorable dinner on the Fourth of July.