Our seafood dinner parties don’t start until October but already I’m thinking of the dishes we will be doing. Many people are curious about the whole live lobster thing and often ask me how chefs deal with them in restaurants.

Different countries deal with them in different ways, mostly like a giant prawn so they are good grilled, boiled, steamed, stir fried, in pasta sauce, in stews and on the Barbie.
They yield approx 25% of their body mass when cooked.

Lobsters are purchased live because they spoil very quickly when dead and the shell makes it impossible to see how fresh they are. You can also buy them ready cooked.

Many chefs pop the lobsters in the freezer or iced salt water for 30 minutes before preparing, since , as they are cold blooded , activity slows to almost zero when the temperature drops and they are pretty much anaesthetised by then. They are then cooked according to the style desired. Try not to overcook them as they toughen very easily.

Pop a pound lobster into boiling salted water with 1 star anise for 4 minutes, turn off the heat and leave in the water until cooled. Good with mayo and salad at room temperature.

Ever boiled a lobster to find it very watery when it is opened? This is probably because it is moulting or shedding its old skin as it grows. When it constructs a new shell (thin and flexible to start) it pumps its body full of water, as much as 50-100% of its original weight. It then replaces it as it grows into its new body. Looking at my lobster while dining in Leeds newest Seafood restaurant last week, I was intrigued as to how they actually mated with all the armour and heavy artillery they carry and was surprised to discover that they have a groovy little ritual.
The female finds the male in his shelter and enters where they have a bit of a boxing ritual when the female occasionally gets violent and clocks him one. She then rests her claws on his body which means he’s clicked, there is now much touching of antennae as she prepares to moult. Yes, sir! In other words she gets her kit off like a human! How about that? Anyway the tail end splits from the main body and she gently slides out, pulling her claws, which have shrunk a little, out of the narrow arm shells. She is now naked and very vulnerable and hardly able to stand on her own legs. they mate a half hour after moulting where he inserts a sealed packet into her abdomen using the world famous thrusting motion most of us use. He then stands guard over her for a week or so eating her discarded shell until she leaves his crib and buries herself in the sand somewhere until her shell toughens up. She stores the packet until she feels like it, up to a year then produces between 5,000 and 100,000 eggs which she fertilizes herself stored under her tail for another year before hatching. So it looks like the female is pretty independent and has a boyfriend just once every 2 years. hmmm.

Seafood breathe and swallow sea water (er obviously !! ) so they had to develop a way to maintain their bodies at the right concentration of dissolved minerals to survive.
Water in the open ocean is about 3% minerals/salt by weight while the optimum level of minerals in sea creatures is less than 1% so they balance the saltiness of seawater by producing amino acids and amines. Glycine is sweet and glutamic acid (monosodium glutamate) is savoury and mouthfilling , contributing to the rich nutty and sweet taste of prawns, scallops, lobsters and other shellfish and crustaceans.

For more info I recommend 2 of my favourite books where I get much information and inspiration.
“Food and Cooking” by Harold McGee. Anyone with any interest in food, professional or otherwise, should buy this book. The best 30 quid you can spend. Period.

“It Must Have Been Something I Ate” by Jeffrey Steingarten. This is another collection of essays from the food critic of American Vogue who has been called “perhaps the world’s wittiest food writer” (Independent). Like his first book (‘The Man Who Ate Everything’) this is full of hilarious foodie trials, tribulations, observations and even a few recipes.

The body of an eagle, the head and hind legs of a deer and with long talons instead of hooves and an enormous sharp beak in place of its mouth. A carnivorous biped mammal with atrophied wings and large red eyes, this rare and miraculous hybrid lives in the snowy valleys and forests of the Maiella, 2000 metres above sea level in the mountains of Abbruzzo (though others are thought to exist in a valley in Nepal). They reach a height of 130 cm, weigh up to 80kg and are known to live for 200 years; it is believed that only 4 exist in the valley now, an adult couple with their 2 little ones, hunting wolves, hares and foxes as they speed through snowstorms keeping close to their lair. When the snows melt the creatures find it very difficult to move over the terrain and the summers can be long, painful and arduous for these mythical beasts.

Very few people have seen a Dau, as they are called; though one of the old chefs who cooked for us that day swears he caught a glimpse of one like a speeding shadow with giant red burning eyes while hunting for snow rabbits 30 years ago in the valley. Rocco spoke in a fierce regional dialect and I suspect he'd had a couple but he managed to sound convincing enough! If you find yourself on a skiing trip around this part of Italy and you hear the howling wind through the trees at night that sounds a little like the plaintive cry of a tormented hungry soul, spare a thought for the Dau and his family, waiting for the cover of a ferocious thunderstorm to venture out of his lair.

We had gone for lunch to a restaurant called La Tana del Dau in a village called Passolanciano Maielletta in the province of Chieti. High season is in the Winter months so it was eerily quiet and the ski lifts were silent skeletons against the bright blue sky. My good friend Bob is a bit of a rural foodie, with the sound of a goose been strangled as his ringtone, so when his mate, chef Graziano, called him to say his pal had bagged a wild boar in the forest along with a dozen large premium quality black truffles we got a posse of 9 together and headed for the hills. The hours drive was spent arguing the merits of truffles from various parts of Italy and if it was in fact worth eating Summer Truffles or better to just wait for winter when they were more intense. I tried to steer the conversation to Bobs other love, crap early 70's hard rock but we kept drifting back to truffles.

The air was amazingly fresh up there after the heat of Pescara when it sometimes got so stifling it felt like hot ozone attacking your face and throat .

We sat down to various local salame and pancetta, roasted salt cod with peppers and some pecorino piccante while we had a glass of Montepulciano and got introduced to the Chef, Graziano. When Graziano was chef for the Italian Tennis squad he travelled abroad a lot. He was trying to get a connection in Heathrow, alone and not realising his connecting flight was at another London airport. He couldn't speak a word of English and was getting nowhere fast until he came up with a very Italian idea. As crowds rolled by he would say Va fa ******* a mammede, which is an insult to someone's mother.

Eventually, a Neapolitan voice calls back the standard response to the insult, translated roughly -'Don't you mean your sister?' Thank God it's an Italian, he replied, do you speak English, please help me! And so got his connection finally sorted. We ate simple hand made fettucine tossed in a little butter and the black truffles were passed around to grate over at your leisure. Flippin' heck I was in heaven and it smelt good! We followed with more fettucine with a ragu made from the wild boar and then a boar stew served with polenta. Throughout we tasted some fabulous red wines, A Montepulciano D'Abbruzzo Emido Pepe from Teramo, a punchy Negroamaro Leone de Castris from Salento, a Sassisto Langhe from Aziende Bera in Piedmonte and a strange tasting Cinabro Vigneti delle Dolomite from Trento which did nothing for me.

We finished with fruit, amaro and 70 proof Centerbe which is guaranteed to help digest EVERYTHING and anything in your stomach in 5 minutes flat. On our way home from lunch (it was 8.15), I thought I should phone and cancel our 9.00pm dinner reservation. No point in overdoing it just 'cos we're on holiday.

Thanks to Edoardo Micati for info on the mythical Dau.

THURSDAY
Its now nearly a week since we arrived in Pescara on the Adriatic coast of Italy and the amount of food and drink I am consuming is starting to worry me.

Take yesterday: Wednesday 12 July and market day.

Wake up to a coffee and brioche, walk around the market and buy a dozen figs picked early that morning along with white peaches, red peaches and a few apricots. See some nice mozzarella di bufola to buy but the gorgeous smell on the stall made me a bit delirious and I end up with a lonzo stagionato, a locally made salame which is sweet and delicately perfumed like the finest Parma Ham; also in the bag went a quarter of a local pecorino cheese, lightly aged and perfect for breakfast the dashing and charming stallholder assures me. The mention of breakfast turns me to the pancetta of course - where else would your mind go at the mention of the most important meal of the day so I got 15 lovely slices. There were 4 prosciuttos, all local, at various stages of curing' but I only took 6 slices of the medium cured one and 6 slices of roast ham to keep it company.

At the egg stall next door a woman was asking which eggs would be best to give raw to her baby, whisked with sugar and milk to give him strength, I took the same ones, 10 for a euro. After a little stroll around the market I headed back to the house via the bakery and picked up a half loaf of country bread.

The kids were hungry and awaiting breakfast so they got boiled eggs and bread; I have never seen such vibrantly coloured eggs, very yellow and a lovely deep white. As for me 4 figs, a peach, an apricot, the salame, prostitute, mozzarella, and pecorino enjoyed with a couple of slices of bread and washed down with 2 glasses of chilled dark Cerasuolo D'Abbruzzo from my mate Stefano’s Enoteca across the road. I thought I would leave the roast ham for later.

At 12.45 on the dot lunchtime begins on the beach, I picked up my tray and glided along the line to choose today’s light beach snack. Octopus and chick pea salad, cold mackerel, fried fresh anchovies, a couple of little grilled squid kebabs, pasta with seafood and chillis plucked from a plant nearby, turnip tops, grilled peppers, fried spinach and a mixed salad with soft pecorino. Fill up a litre jug (twice with chilled Cerasuolo and Bobs your Uncle. I must point out that I always share lunch with my wife so it's not really as much as it seems but it is enough for you to fall asleep under the brolly for at least 2 hours. I also had 3 large beers through the afternoon on account of the intense heat but usually I have water.

We had a table for 11 people booked in a neighbourhood restaurant set well back from the beach, Gerardo’s is always full of locals and you are lucky to get a table without reservations. My friends Simon and Lyall were over from Leeds with their families so we had a bit of a blow out. Marinated anchovies, tomato bruschetta and very large boiled Scampi (Langostines) for antipasto. Spaghetti with vongole verace for the pasta course then a selection of grilled and deep fried fish and seafood with some chips and salad. Lemon sorbet and complimentary amaro rounded off a great dinner. This restaurant specialises in fish, in particular the boiled Scampi and the salt cod with peppers but another big draw are the modest prices, we drunk the local house wine and the price for 4and1/2 liters ..13.5 euros for the lot! That's less than a tenner and it wasn't a mistake.

And that's why I am feeling a little worried.

The Clan travelled to Pescara in Abbruzzo for our yearly visit a couple of days before the final and found ourselves in a country gripped in Mondiale Madness. We thought it would be fun to watch the match in one of the main squares, Piazza Sallotto, so headed down on our pushbikes with the rest of the throng, flags waving, horns blaring, flares flaring and the fever in evidence everywhere.

The promised big screen was big all right but the actual picture seemed smaller than the picture on my telly at home, cue lots of flying plastic bottles and good natured mickey taking, then France got the penalty and on the crappy screen it looked as if Zidane missed.

The place went absolutely ballistic with joy, then with anger, then the flippin' screen went blank and it all started to feel a bit tense. If you've watched a footie match with Italians you'll know what I mean. We decided to jump on the bikes and head to the Lido bar on our beach where we got there just in time to see the equaliser and more sheer Bedlam with kids as young as 6 or 7 going mad and grandmas applauding heartily and grinning as if it was their own grandsons on the pitch.

At the end of the second half we got word that Uncle Pinu was in the Pizzeria Medusa next door where he is known and had the best table in the house, right in front of a giant Plasma Screen. Bottles of Montepulciano and great pizza followed while we watched the rest of the thrilling climax and enjoyed jumping and screaming with the rest of the crowd (I don't think I can call them Clientele in this instance as they deafened everyone with those noisy air horn things.

I saw a few wrested away and stomped on by one or two irate people as well! Everyone piled out on to the Lungomare seafront where the police and army were already stationed, diverting traffic and keeping an eye, only one mind you, on what seemed like the whole town out on bikes, scooters, tractors, trucks and cars with people on the roof, bonnet and hanging out of all doors and windows, the cacophony of horns and the thousands of flags making it seem like a war had just been won, which I suppose just had in the minds of some fans. We decided to follow the party back to Piazza Sallotto on our bikes but the crowds were getting big and a bit crazy and I feared Salvo and his little bike might get swept away in the river of human Azzuro so we headed back home absolutely drained but still buzzing at being part of such a wonderful experience.

The following morning, talk in the bars and on the beach revolved around where their World Cup Stars where heading. The match fixing and corruption scandals in Italian football means a fall from grace of some of the biggest teams in Serie A and a fire sale of some of the stars of the tournament.

I heard the rumour that Cannavaro and Buffon are heading for Leeds United, come on Mr. Bates don't keep us in suspense.