Saturday 12th September, 2020 – Haar at Home (Goan Lobster Box)

After a lobster box from Côte, it was time to wheel out the big guns in September with a box from Haar. This is a restaurant in Scotland, headed up by Dean Banks, a former Masterchef finalist, who opened the restaurant a year ago. As with many restaurants at the moment, they’ve decided to deal with the current crisis by despatching meals all over the UK. The Goan Lobster box was on offer and sounded interesting as well as tasty so I ordered it and waited for it to arrive on the Thursday before we wanted it.

The packaging was vast, but everything was securely stowed inside it. A QR code was provided that you could scan to get the appropriate instructions. On unpacking we found two lobsters in separate foil containers, a large vacuum packed container of Goan curry sauce, two containers of tomatoes to make a kachumba with, along with a separate tub containing the cucumber, and onions that would go with the tomatoes, a sachet of salad dressing, a large bag of new potatoes and butter, and a separate loaf of seeded bread. Everything was clearly labelled just in case you couldn’t work it out yourself, though it wasn’t exactly difficult.

As with our previous at-home experiences, the instructions were clear and very simple.

The tomato kachumber was simple a matter of combining the tomatoes, the cucmber and onion mix and the salad dressing in a nice bowl  This was quickly achieved and stowed in the fridge for later in the evening (it also provided three very useful lidded plastic tubs for future use in the freezer and elsewhere).

Almost everything else just required the oven, heated to 180°C (for the fan oven). The potatoes needed longest, and simply went into an oven=proof dish to roast gently for 35 or so minutes in the butter and herbs that they were packed with.

The curry sauce went into a pan to be gently heated through on the hob. With ten minutes or so left for the potatoes, it was time to add the lobsters to the oven, in the foil containers they were despatched in. A further five minutes and the bread was also popped in there to warm through. All that remained was to select a suitable wine (you can also order matched wines from Haar but I chose to select from the 300 or so bottles I have sitting here!).

After a pre-dinner drink, and with the table formally set, we were ready to eat. So how was it?

In short – fabulous! In more detail, the lobster was tender and sweet-fleshed (and easy to extract from the shells), the Goan curry sauce packed a punch, and the potatoes were just slightly browned and bathed in buttery loveliness.

The kachumber cut through the heat of the sauce and the fattiness of the butter perfectly and was a nice touch with something that might otherwise have been too heavy. The bread was also fantastic, soft centred with a nice crunch to the crust, though it was far more than the two of us needed. This wasn’t a problem, because it toasted up beautifully the following morning, and was superb with a poached egg! And as a fnal plus I also have more lobster shells to use to make a shellfish bisque a little later. Would I buy it again? I certainly would.