Planning Ahead - The Huffington Post Lobster Bisque

I'm the type of person who needs to think about things and let them percolate in my head sometimes before my ideas are fully realized. This applies to cooking and personalizing recipes just as much as it does anything else in my life! This and any future "Planning Ahead" posts will be me reflecting and brainstorming on cooking ideas that I'd like to try at some point in the future but haven't finished thinking about yet.

We were out with friends the other day, and it was mentioned that the Huffington Post had recently published a Lobster bisque recipe ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/one-for-the-table/this-lobster-bisque-is-be_b_242686.html ) that while "far to complex for them" was "perfect for us" to try. I can definitely see why looking at it, and it doesn't seem overly complicated.

Lobster, while expensive, isn't a terrible difficult ingredient to work with as long as you take your time and are careful. Steaming is actually a fairly gentle way of preparing it, and only really requires to the cook to be patient enough to wait until its fully cooked. And who needs to put hot liquids in a blender (dangerous!) when you DO have an immersion blender?? (Definitely my favourite kitchen tool, btw!)

Interesting that the wine is almost equivalent to the chicken broth; that'll definitely up the flavour...and possibly add in part of that "better than sex" factor. :p I'm thinking of a Riesling or a Gwertz rather than a Chardonnay, but that's my personal preference talking. I'm questioning the need for the fennel here...there is quite a bit, and fennel is the equivalent of adding black licorice in the kitchen. I'll probably end up trying it, but I'm just not sure what it's going to add to the soup.

The nice thing about the recipe is that while it's a very LONG list of ingredients, there are only a few steps, meaning that multiple ingredients go in at the same time. When it comes to prep, that means you can set things up so that everything in each step is already combined, spreading things up and streamlining your kitchen. (Needless to say that I suffer in a very SMALL kitchen at the moment!) On the other hand, this is a very LONG recipe time wise, especially when it comes to soup. Its one thing to start by making your own chicken or veggie stock and then turning that into soup, but that's a different process entirely. After prep, this is at least a two hour recipe, if not more. Definitely a weekend meal then!