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Last lobster rolls of summer — one classic cold lobster salad, one with hot garlic butter, at the Lobster Roll in Amagansett

Dropped into The Crow’s Nest on the eve of Hurricane Earl and got seated right away — a nice change of pace indeed. It was dark and just a little drafty, in a fun weathering-the-storm way. 

This was our second wildly successful attempt at fish tacos this summer. There  isn’t much to it. Just a hot grill, a big piece of locally caught mahi mahi, homemade guac and, for kicks, grilled honey-glazed pineapple. Bonus points for black bean salad, lime crema and thinly sliced radishes. Pop open a Corona and hello last-days-of-summer bliss.

I have enjoyed many a frosty frozen margarita at Sam Talbot’s Surf Lodge, but had yet to eat there until recently. Four of us went and since it was late on a Wednesday night, we were seated relatively quickly. We each got something different and no one was disappointed. I had the cod, which was fabulous. The fish tacos are the signature dish there, and they were sick too.

I am so behind on posting that I never even mentioned my birthday dinner at the Crow’s Nest. I had such fun. The staff was so sweet, they doted on me and brought out a pretty little bread pudding cake with a candle. Also quite sweet were my housemates, who picked me up with a chocolate frosted yellow cake waiting for me in the car. We brought the cake to Liars, where there was a group of guys who won a shark fishing competition and thereby bought us drinks all night. I tried to feed someone a bite of cake that had a candle in it…that’s about as much as I remember. What a great beach birthday!

Life at the beach is conducive to cooking for three reasons:

1.) Food just seems to taste better after a long salty day,

2.) There’s not much else to do when the sun goes down, and

3.) There’s no good way for me to get to a restaurant.

And while I may not have all my fancy gadgets here, I can still make it happen. Handmaking hummus with a potato masher as opposed to my Cuisinart made me feel a bit like a pilgrim from like the 1920s, albeit a hummus-eating pilgrim. Bonus pilgrim points because I soaked the chickpeas overnight instead of popping open a can. I also made heirloom cherry tomato tabouleh by soaking bulghur and chopping up herbs grown at home (yet more P-points). I grated the carrots for the Moroccan Carrot Salad by hand which took about 300 times longer than it would’ve had I zipped them through a food processor, but I got a good workout and the results were so sweet that I really can’t complain.

At press time, Harvest on Fort Pond is my favorite resto in MTK. I’ve been twice now, and the first time I had this lovely piece of fish in a vanilla corn sauce that I’m still dreaming of. They serve family-size portions which are the antithesis of the small-plate movement, so two people would order one app and one main and split it. In this format, I find you get to really dig in and just concentrate on the flavors of that one thing instead of the what’s-coming-out-next mentality you have when you order 17 things. It’s quite soothing actually.

Torrential rain in Montauk means I’m taking full advantage of the in-house washing machine by laundering all my sandy sundresses and also that I’m doing a fair amount kitchen rummaging. I went to town on this Sugar Baby watermelon, extracting hundreds of seeds before turning it into a watermelon-feta-basil (again, supposed to be mint) salad.

A Lobster Roll at The Lobster Roll in Amagansett