The Oyster Experiment

So, I kinda felt bad about going to New Orleans and eating delicious food without my husband and son.  Lauren brought her husband and son.  And I just felt bad.  So I got a crazy idea last night when I went to the asian grocery at Cap Cir and the Parkway.  Right next door is this seafood market that sold oysters, so I thought I would buy some oysters and grill them up all New Orleans like.  Plus one of my first memories was sitting my Dad and Nicole in the kitchen of our house, while he ate oysters with ketchup (which Nicole really liked).  Plus Appalachicola oysters are the best in the world.  Period.  They are huge (the shells are about half the size of one's palm) and they taste like the sea.

I didnt really know how many to buy and I have never shucked an oyster before.  Turns out, that half a bushel is actually a metric ton of oysters.  And most people take a cooler to get them, otherwise, you end up with paper bags full of ice in plastic bags.  And they leak all over the kitchen.  And I am not really good with an oyster knife.  And you really should be wearing gloves when you shuck an oyster.  And shucking oysters is really more of a weekend thing.  And more of an outside thing.  Oh, and while I dont know any other 2 year old that likes butter as much as Nico does (you'd think his last name was Deen), or asiago cheese, or salsa, the boy had very little interest in oysters.  Surprise surprise.  

In the course of an hour and a half, I managed to shuck maybe 30 oysters, make a mess in the kitchen, gash the tip of my left ring finger open (in such a way that I bled for a while).  And I dont know how I did it, but I have what appears to be about 5 paper thin cuts on my right thumb.  Suffice to say, the oysters got away from me a bit.