A Series of Recipes for the Grill

Family vacations with my parents always involved food in some way. A memorable trip we took was one summer when I was in my early teens. My parents rented a station wagon and we drove from New York to Maine. The coast of Maine is quite dramatic, and having recently taken up photography as a new hobby, I took countless pictures of the waves breaking against the rocky coast with my new camera. It was lobster, however, that left me with the most indelible memory of our trip. We ate lobster practically every day. We usually ate dinner at a restaurant, but during the day, we used the hibachi grill we had brought with us to grill seafood, vegetables, and even fruit. One day, we had acquired live lobsters from the dock and decided we would grill them for lunch. As soon as the grill was hot, my parents put the lobsters on it . . . and they promptly walked off the grill. Although we are hardly a vegetarian family, we had no desire to inflict a slow, painful death on those poor creatures. On the other hand, they had been just caught and we were not going to forgo eating them. Fortunately, at the picnic table next to us was a family who obviously had more experience with grilling lobsters, and they showed us how to kill them quickly by plunging a knife right behind their eyes. We did finally enjoy our lobsters that day, but for the rest of the trip we ate lobster only at restaurants. I confess I have not grilled lobster since then. My favorite way to have it is boiled in water “as salty as the ocean” and dipped in melted butter and lemon.