Oysterrific!

Well, as I’ve been unraveling myself from my chapter-writing, I’ll admit that I’ve been slacking off on my blogging. I earned it, dammit!

Anyway, my day was mostly pretty uneventful and kinda lame, except for my trip to the market this morning. I was walking through my neighborhood market, buying my usual veggies and fruits and so on, when I came across the oyster stand. It’s been oyster season for the past few weeks, and I’ve been doing my best to avoid the oyster stand, since I was sure that I couldn’t afford the delicacy.

Today, I actually took a good look at the prices and had a shock: you can get a dozen smallish oysters for 2€!! Even more excitingly, I bought a baker’s dozen of Fines de Claires No. 2 for 8€!!!!1!one! These are the third-largest class of oysters you can get (after No. 1 and No. 0), of the highest-price variety of oysters in the world (Bélon oysters). In a restaurant here in Paris, 12 of these oysters would easily cost 4 times as much.

So I bought a dozen (and got an extra oyster for free) and headed home, ready to fill myself with oyster-y goodness. It took a while to re-learn how to shuck an oyster, but I eventually got the hang of it and pulled all of them apart. I was a smart boy and did all of the shucking over a bowl, so any of the liquid that I lost in the process was saved for making an oyster-juice-based Bloody Caesar and the like. In fact, the oyster liquor was really useful as a sort of salty broth for deglazing pans; I used most of it that night when I was sautéing a pile of winter vegetables. Mmm.