We just got back from the Lobster Shack. We knew that they’d be closing after Columbus Day, so this was our window of opportunity.

Lobster rolls are a quintessential summer food. Sure, I could get a lobster roll in any of a dozen seafood shacks hereabouts any time of the year, but they’re just not the same thing. In much the same way that I like to cook turkey only at Thanksgiving, I like to eat lobster rolls only in the summer (okay, this is early autumn, but you get the point).

As is often the case with things that are truly sublime, simplicity is the key here. Lobster meat, butter, a toasted split-top hot dog bun. Perhaps the faintest splash of fresh lemon juice. That’s all there is.

And now that it’s over for the season, we’ll turn our appetites toward heartier fare. I’ll keep an eye on the calendar come spring, though.

Yesterday, Jim and I trekked to the swamps of New Jersey to watch Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band blow down the old Giants Stadium (a new one is being constructed adjacent to the old one). Going to a Bruce concert at Giants Stadium is kind of a special thing — y’all know he’s a Jersey boy, so the audience tends to be filled with the hometown crowd and kindred spirits from the Tri-State area (like us). One of the most appealing facets of a warm weather Springsteen show is the parking lot tailgate, and at Giants Stadium shows it’s always marked by a pretty festive atmosphere. Yesterday’s was only slightly dampened by the weather (which was rainy on and off, and therefore dampening); there were people playing football, people grilling burgers and dogs, and Springsteen music blaring from all directions.

After we stunned ourselves by actually securing the wristbands that would guarantee us entry into the pit, we retired to the back of the van, where we partook of a very nice picnic lunch that consisted of the following:

• Tortellini and Pesto with Grape Tomatoes
• Pepper/Herb Encrusted Dry Salami
• Fresh Mozzarella
• Concord Grapes

The salad was really easy — fresh tortellini from the supermarket mixed with about 3/4 pint of grape tomatoes and a container of store-bought pesto. The dry salami has become a favorite around here for antipasto. I sliced that thinly, and sliced the fresh mozzarella. The grapes we ate straight out of the container — like eating grape jelly!

For dessert, we cracked open a box of cinnamon cookies. Beverage was sparkling water (we don’t do beer at concerts as a rule, mostly because we need to drive long distances afterward).

I also bought some Greek olive hummus and pita chips to dip, but we found the rest of it so satisfying that we never even cracked that open.

The show, by the way, was fantastic.

Today for lunch I’m heating up some leftover butternut squash soup. I love this soup for several reasons: it’s a great way to use butternut squash and it always makes me feel autumnal; it’s visually appealing; and it tastes good. If that’s not enough for you,  it’s absurdly easy to make. In fact, it’s easy and quick enough for a weeknight.

Butternut Squash Soup

• Approx. 2 lbs. butternut squash, peeled, seeded, and cut into chunks
• 1 32-oz. carton Swanson Natural Goodness chicken broth (or an equivalent amount of homemade stock, or vegetable stock if you’re a vegetarian)
• 1 large onion, chopped roughly
• 2 tbs. butter
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Cream (optional)

Melt the butter over medium heat in a stockpot or very large sauce pan. When it bubbles, toss in the onions and cook, stirring frequently, until they’ve softened and are just beginning to turn golden. Add in the squash, pour in the stock, bring to a boil. Reduce heat to a medium-low (you want it at a lively simmer), cover, and cook until the squash is very soft, approximately 20-30 minutes.

Once the squash has cooked, you’ll want to either puree this in batches in your blender, or use an immersion blender to blend it in the pot.

Add just a little bit of cream if desired, and season to taste with salt and pepper. If the soup is too thick for your liking, you can thin it to the desired consistency with more stock or a bit of water. Taste for seasoning again.

Notes: If you really don’t have the time to peel and cut the squash (it’s really not all that hard, in spite of the squash’s appearance), you can use two bags of frozen butternut squash (I’ve done this in a pinch), in which case you’ll want to cut down a tad on the stock (just use enough to barely cover the squash in the pot), or you can find pre-peeled butternut squash at the supermarket (these can be kind of dry, so buyer beware).

You can vary the seasoning however your imagination allows. This is very nice with a bit of thyme in it (fresh or dried), and I also like mine seasoned with a bit of curry powder. Alternatively, you can sweeten it a bit and add just a little bit of brown sugar, and a pinch of cinammon and/or nutmeg. I would probably season it that way if I were serving very small portions as an appetizer, but not if I were using the soup as the main part of my dinner.

Obviously, it’s soup, which means there are very few rules. Let your imagination and your taste be your guide.

Sometimes the best meals are the ones you’re not expecting.

Jim and I had lunch downtown today with friends we haven’t seen in a while. We ate at Anna Liffey’s, an Irish pub in a dim downstairs room with a good selection on tap and a dart board. We all had fairly substantial lunch fare — I enjoyed an open-face steak sandwich with some fine onion rings, washed down with a pint of Smithwick’s.

Since we’re accustomed to very light (and beerless) lunches, dinner on those rare occasions when we lunch out is usually a pretty meager affair. And right around the time we were wondering what we might be in the mood for, I decided I had a hankering for breakfast. I asked Jim if he felt like cooking, and blueberry pancakes were not out of the question.

We just finished mopping up our plates — they were good and just the right thing. It’s a rainy night, there’s some good TV on, and I have a tequila sunrise to finish.

Here’s to brinner. And to Friday.

As I feared they would, the tomatoes are beginning to ripen all at once. I’ve already got some beautiful, ripe plum tomatoes waiting in the kitchen, and I just came in from the garden with a colander full of Romas, a couple of regular-style tomatoes (the vines are so entangled amongst themselves right now I have no idea what’s coming from what plant, except for the heirlooms, which have a distinctive look but haven’t ripened enough to pick yet), and two more flawless zucchini.

This morning I made two loaves of zucchini bread (from the Morning Glory Farm cookbook — their breads are just heavenly) from one of our big, gorgeous squash, and the Romas are likely going into a good pasta and fresh mozzarella salad for lunches next week.

I spent the last couple of weeks straying from my plan to chart my weekly menus out ahead of time, and I regretted it for the most part. Having a plan is better than not having a plan, and I like to be flexible with my plans, but I still like having some kind of a guideline. Last week I found myself running out of food (and therefore hitting the store more often than I would have liked) and feeling at loose ends when I came home from work.

Here’s this week’s game plan:

Sunday

• Grilled Vegetable Antipasto
• Rigatoni with Sunday Sauce - Braciole and Sausage
• Bread

Monday

• Breaded Chicken Cutlets
• Zucchini and Tomato Casserole

Tuesday

• Pasta with Leftover Sauce from Sunday’s Dinner

Wednesday

• Pork Tenderloin with Banana-Date Chutney
• Green Beans with Garlic and Ginger
• Naan

Thursday

• White Chicken Chili
• Salad with Jicama and Oranges
• Spicy Jalapeno-Cheddar Cornbread

Friday

• Maybe we’ll have fish. Maybe we’ll eat out. We’ll see.

There. I feel better just for having written it all down.

I’ve talked before about the Lobster Shack in Branford, a little trailer-type place on the Branford River that makes the best lobster rolls on the shoreline. I’m not sure I’ve mentioned the Cupcake Truck here, so a few words of introduction are in order. The Cupcake Truck is an ingenious entrepreneurial enterprise run by an enthusiastic young couple who are apparently escapees from careers in business. Essentially a mobile cupcake bakery, the truck makes weekly rounds of several regular stops in the New Haven area, and on the weekends frequently heads out to special events and more suburban locations. It’s hard to describe how good these cupcakes are — freshly baked each day, they’re frosted when you order them and at $2 apiece constitute one of the most reasonable splurges around.

Anyway, yesterday the Cupcake Truck parked at the Lobster Shack. It was impossible to pass up this confluence of events, despite the fact that we’d had lobster rolls just last weekend, so we planned the morning accordingly. We both worked out in the morning, bypassed breakfast altogether, and had brunch by the river: we split a lobster roll, shared a dozen grilled clams, consumed two bottle of water, and then stood in line in the heat and humidity for an hour to grab a couple of cupcakes. By the time it was our turn, choices were limited: Jim got the very last red velvet cupcake (he likes his with the white chocolate/cream cheese frosting), and my chocolate cupcake, which was supposed to have chocolate frosting on it, instead had half chocolate/half peanut butter. Like everything else that comes off the truck, the peanut butter frosting is heavenly. The cupcake was indulgent and delicious, and the peanut butter frosting may well become a habit.

Honestly, the heat pretty much did us in for the rest of the day. But it was worth it to experience a perfect storm of perfect foods.

Seriously.

Saturday is often fish night around here, and I stopped at Bud’s this afternoon and came home with a fabulous piece of Irish salmon. If I haven’t said so before, let me say now that salmon is my favorite fish. A quick stop at a nearby farm market yielded some native zucchini and corn on the cob.

The salmon prep couldn’t be simpler. I cut my salmon in half lengthwise so that I had two narrow pieces of uniform thickness. I put them in a baking dish sprayed lightly with Pam, and then brushed them with some melted butter and sprinkled them with some salt and freshly ground pepper and — best part — some fresh dill from our potted herb garden. The salmon goes into a 425 degree oven for maybe 15 or 20 minutes depending on how thick it is at its thickest part. This was a good 2 inches thick, so it cooked closer to 20 minutes.

While the fish was in the oven, I heated up the grill and cooked my veggies. The corn got brushed generously with olive oil, as did the zucchini, which I split in half lengthwise. Everything got seasoned lightly with salt and pepper, and turned over once on the grill to cook both sides. The corn is done when it starts to brown nicely, and the zucchini is done when it has nice grill marks and is tender but not mushy. I have to say that corn on the cob cooked this way — and with olive oil instead of butter — has become my absolute favorite way to eat it. This corn was wonderful too, incredibly sweet and flavorful.

That was dinner. Simple and about as delicious as it gets, really.

This recipe is especially for my friend Mark Saleski that he might assuage his anchovy hunger. Another of those weeknight wonders and easily one of my favorite pasta recipes. This has pretty bold flavors and is not for food wimps.

Pasta Puttanesca

• 4 tbs olive oil
• 4 medium cloves garlic, minced or sliced thinly
• 4 or 5 flat anchovy fillets, drained and chopped
• 2 tbs capers, drained and rinsed
• 1/2 cup pitted Kalamata olives, coarsely chopped
• 1/2 cup fresh parsley, chopped
• 28-oz can diced tomatoes
• Salt and pepper to taste
• 3/4 lb penne or other tubular pasta (rigatoni are good here too)

While you boil the water and cook the pasta, make the sauce.

Heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the garlic and anchovies and stir, breaking the anchovies up with a wooden spoon until they’re pretty well dissolved in the oil. Add the tomatoes and season lightly with salt (the anchovies are going to be pretty salty, so TASTE IT) and more heavily with freshly ground pepper. Let it bubble at a lively simmer until the pasta is nearly done, then add the olives, capers, and parsley. Taste for seasoning, and when the pasta’s ready, toss everything together.

Do serve a good, crusty bread with this, and something to drink that will stand up to the sauce — a non-wimpy beer or a full-bodied red wine are both good choices. A nice accompaniment is a hearty green salad, and maybe a chunk of good Parmigiano-Reggiano.

If you consider the ingredients for this dish to be pantry staples (and you should) you can whip this up pretty much any time on the spur of the  moment. The recipe scales well too, in case you have unexpected guests. The sauce by itself is delicious on other things — sometimes when I have a small amount left over, I spoon a bit on top of a piece of grilled tuna or swordfish. Quite spectacular. It would also do nicely on a serving of polenta. This is a great year-round dish — hearty enough for winter, quick enough for a warm summer night. It’s almost like the perfect dish!

In the interest of getting dinner on the table quickly mid-week, I’ve developed a repertoire of dishes that I can throw together in about 30 minutes. Not surprisingly, many of them involve pasta paired with a simple sauce that can be thrown together and cooked (or not) while you’re waiting for the water to come to a boil. This is one such dish, and it depends on your having some pantry staples on hand and a little bit of seafood hiding in your freezer.

I’m in the habit of buying those giant bags (2 lb. I think) of frozen shrimp when they go on sale at the supermarket. I don’t get the cooked ones, I get the uncooked. You can thaw them out in minutes by running them under cold water, and they’re really good to use in dishes where the shrimp is a component. They’re not what I’d buy to make baked stuffed shrimp, for example, but for shrimp and rice, or paella, or any kind of pasta dish, they’re absolutely great. Last night I had the remainder of a bag of very large ones that I had used for another purpose — there were seven shrimp left, and they were pretty big. So I made this, which we really like:

Shrimp Fra Diavolo

• Linguini or similar type of pasta (1/2 lb. to 1 lb. depending on appetite and/or number of people at table)
• 28-oz. can diced tomatoes
• 2 tbs olive oil
• 2 or 3 cloves of minced garlic (or to taste)
• Salt and pepper
• Crushed red pepper flakes
• Fresh parsley
• 3/4 - 1 lb. shrimp ( or scallops — or you can use shellfish, in which case you’ll want a bit more by weight, or you can use a combination)

Put the water on to boil and cook your pasta al dente. While that’s happening, make your sauce. I like to do this sauce in a skillet as opposed to a sauce pan because the sauce doesn’t cook for long and it cooks a bit more thoroughly this way.

Heat the olive oil over medium heat, and then add the garlic. Don’t brown the garlic — as soon as it starts to become fragrant, add the tomatoes (with their juice — don’t drain them). Season to taste with salt and pepper, and add crushed red pepper to taste. The whole point of fra diavolo is spiciness, but be judicious if you have timid taste buds or haven’t used red pepper before. Simmer the sauce at a lively bubble — it’s not going to cook for long, but you do want it to thicken a bit while the pasta cooks.

About five minutes before your pasta is ready, add a handful of chopped parsley, and then add the seafood to the sauce and simmer until just cooked — if you’re using shrimp or scallops, cook them until opaque (or pink in the case of shrimp); if you’re using shellfish, cover the pan and cook until the shells open.

Drain the pasta, toss with some of the sauce, and arrange on plates topped with seafood.

As always, my favorite recipes are flexible. This will serve two to four people depending on how much pasta and seafood you use. You can always add more tomatoes too. It’s good enough to serve guests, and it’s really quick. Bread is a good accompaniment, and a green salad.

I was in the mood for chili this week. Since the house is cool now (AC all fixed, thank you very much), we don’t need to eat salads and sandwiches every night. Every now and then I can cook the sort of thing you don’t necessarily want to eat when it’s hot and steamy out. There were three avocados on the counter that had ripened to perfection (really) and we stopped at Jalapeno Heaven on the way home to get a bag of their excellent chips. My guacamole is simplicity itself: three ripe avocados, one (or two) cloves of pressed garlic, the juice of one lemon. Mash avocados with a fork, add in the garlic and the lemon juice, mix well. That’s it, truly. It’s the best.

My friend Greg taught me how to make real chili a long time ago — the kind with chunks of meat instead of ground beef. He grew up on the west coast and believed that real chili contained little more than chunks of beef and fresh chili peppers. Then you simmered it until the meat was ready to melt in your mouth. We’d experiment with that recipe all the time — add some tomatoes, add some beer. It never did have chili powder in it though. And it never had beans. Sometimes it was almost too spicy to eat, in which case we’d just drink the margaritas or beer that always accompanied such feasting. The problem with this type of chili is that you need a long afternoon in which to cook it as it takes several hours to simmer it to just-rightness.

What I like about this chili recipe is that it’s really quick, and it’s made from things you’ll usually have in the pantry anyway. If you don’t have (or don’t want) chips, you can always make a pan of cornbread to go with.

Weeknight Chili

• 1 large onion, chopped
• 1 tbs vegetable oil
• 1 lb ground beef
• 28-oz can crushed tomatoes
• 1 can black beans, drained and rinsed
• chili powder
• cumin
• salt and pepper

Heat the oil over medium heat and cook the onion until soft. Turn the heat up a bit, add the ground beef, and break it up with a wooden spoon, cooking until it’s no longer pink. Season with salt and pepper. Add chili powder and cumin, stir, and cook for a couple more minutes. Add the tomatoes and the beans, and simmer for at least 20-30 minutes, longer if you’d like. Serve accompanied by chips or cornbread. Also good — guacamole, sour cream, grated cheddar or jack cheese, salsa.

You’ll notice I didn’t specify an amount for the chili powder or cumin. I’ve seen recipes for chili that call for a scant tablespoon or two of chili powder. I’m not sure what the point of a tablespoon is — I rarely use less than 1/4 of a cup. In any case, the point is that all chili powders are different (I like Penzey’s medium hot) and everyone’s palate is different. So use as much chili powder as you like. I usually keep the cumin to a teaspoon or so since it’s pretty pungent and there’s likely some in the chili powder anyway.

Similarly, use whatever kind of beans you like. Sometimes when I double this recipe, I use two different kinds of beans, but I tend to like black beans better than kidney beans, so that’s what I usually use. I’ve been known to use cannellini beans, too.

Cold beer washes it all down nicely.