You use real seawater to keep it alive until cooking, not to cook the lobster in!

I used a good set of scissors for cutting down the center. I wasn't afraid to make a mess by ripping through the claws and limbs with my bare hands. Cracking those parts with a shell cracker (or a nut cracker if it's a large lobster) is a far better alternative, though.

White is right!

Some people eat every bit, even the eyes. I discarded anything that looked like it would have a poor mouth feel and recommend the same. If it doesn't look anything like tail meat, it probably doesn't taste anything like tail meat.

The tail is the easy part and has the best meat, and is why a lot of people just buy the tails instead of the whole creature.

It's about time for bambam's legendary buyer's remorse to kick in.

An axe?

Discard the entire overgrown insect and get a steak.

I had to reread that a few times. I kept getting fist instead of fish

Anywho, I've never cooked lobster myself, however my father has. He prefers to steam it and not boil it. Says it tastes better. I wouldn't honestly know as I refuse to eat ocean bugs. Also they do scream when steamed, in the sense that the screaming is actually steam escaping from their shell.

Fortunately I discovered a #cooking channel on freenode that helped out a bit. Apparently the white substance is blood that turns white when cooked. Apparently it's safe to eat. It's supposed to be mostly tasteless, and indeed I ate some off of my finger and it seemed mostly tasteless.

Nice.

That was one of the things I feared most. If I found a mess in the box when I opened it I probably would have inconspicuously chucked it in the dumper and showered ...

The pot wasn't really big enough. It just barely fit the lobster. It turns out I was mistaken about the size thing. Looking more closely at the label it appears that the lobster was 0.9x kg, which is just over 2 lbs, as I thought originally. The price corresponds to that too, thankfully. I'm not sure why the label says "size 1 - 1.25 lbs", but meh... In any case, I waited about 9-10 minutes, and the lobster seemed red so I removed the pot from heat and put the lobster on the counter.

I don't know what you just said there, but it sounds like extra work.

How do you know when the meat is white? Or did you remove the meat before cooking?

I discovered that there is quite a bit of tension in the rubber bands. The first one went flying across the room. Fortunately, not into my eye. Interestingly, the shell is also very inflexible and attempting to cut into it leads to a lot of tension. A few good pieces went rocketing across my kitchen (again, fortunately not into my eye). I did manage to cut myself trying to break into the arms by hand. At this point I basically have the whole thing opened up. I have scooped most of the tomalley into a glass. I tasted it off my fingers (direct from the "body cavity") a few times and I'm not sure yet how I feel about it. It's "different". The fact that I scooped it out of an animal that was alive a couple of hours ago probably has gotten to my nerves a bit. Maybe I'll enjoy it more with lemon juice and/or lobster meat. We'll see. It seems that I yielded about a cereal bowl worth of meat from this 2 lb lobster. I've so far only really eaten a smaller pincher worth of meat. And maybe another crumb. It does taste good though. It is quite a bit of mess though. When the smoke clears I figure I'll be cleaning the kitchen all night, partly due to inexperience.

Horrible Idea

I wouldn't want to disappoint anyone. I failed... The meat seemed good originally; the couple of pieces that I tasted while I cut it open. I think I did two things wrong: I took way too long to eat the meat and I microwaved it to try to warm it up. It took me probably a good 2 or 3 hours to get the lobster all carved up and the meat extracted. I finally got the "carcass" thrown away and decided to melt some margarine (I don't have butter) in the same dish to eat it with. I did this while I took the Styrofoam box down to the dumpster. When I got back I excitedly grabbed the meat from the microwave and went to take a bite. To my horror it didn't break off nice and soft. It refused to come apart. It was rubbery... I couldn't even try to eat it. I think the meat was ruined... Ugh. I haven't given up on lobster, but I don't think I'll attempt to cook it again until I've tried it at an actual restaurant. It's going to be a real bitch to clean the kitchen now. I've mostly cleaned up the mess from the lobster, but I already had a stack of dishes waiting to be cleaned and this just pushed me over the edge. In any case, since cutting the lobster up sent spray and shell everywhere I'll have a fun time trying to clean it all up amongst my appliances and such. >:(

Wow, that is a high-end grocery store!

I usually only kill them first as I usually BBQ them rather than dropping them in a pot, and I don;t want them to tun away.

You're supposed to do that while you're eating it.
At least that's my experience of being at a table with people who are eating lobster.

EDIT:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axDtj2bSduM
(Sorry about the quality, best I could find).

EDIT2: embedding of external video not working?

Wasn't it in family guy or the simpsons where somebody got a lobster and it turned into their best friend (no, not homer's pig). Or maybe a film. It's definitely something.

But, what's wrong with killing it humanely like chopping it's head off or stabbing it in the heart rather than letting it boil to death, though whether they have no nervous system to feel pain I don't know.

I agree that microwaving seafood is probably a bad idea (I did it as a desperate attempt to salvage the lobster), but for other meats it comes in very handy. For example, sloppy joe meat. Sure, you could go to the trouble of heating it back up in a pan, but it only takes like 45 seconds in the microwave, and no extra dishes! Of course the meat can dry out if you microwave it too long, but otherwise I see no harm in it at all.

If that were true I would eat it a lot more often. It's nowhere near as expensive as lobster, but it's not quite as cheap as beef.

As do I. I don't think I'll try it again until I've tried it in a restaurant though, which could be a while since I don't think there are any restaurants nearby that serve it.

Their head is wrapped in the exoskeleton too so I'm not sure how humanely you could remove it and if they have hearts they must be pretty small because I didn't see any.

Today I woke up feeling pretty sick. I'm not sure if it was the little bit of lobster that I consumed (it was enough to give me strong gas all night and morning though) or if it was something else (afterward I made a ton of fries since the lobster was ruined and might have made too many to fully cook on the baking sheet).