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Welcome to my blog, these are the ramblings and musings of an (upper) middle aged biker and if you enjoy braais, (barbeques) beers and motorbikes then hopefully you will enjoy what Janet and I do; we do lots of braais, we drink lots of beer and we tour South Africa on our motorbike, which at the moment is a BMW R1200RT. Join us, read about what we do and please leave us your comments.



Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Oyster Extravaganza; four different oyster dishes

Still no chance of a ride! We are going through a terrible weather patch at the moment; gale force northerly winds and lots of rain, I am getting some serious withdrawal symptoms, I went into the garage yesterday and just started the big red machine up to see if the battery was alright, it started but after a bit of a struggle! Apparently the coming weekend is not going to be good so I'll just have to look out for a gap.
Tonight we had my old buddy Frank over for dinner as is our usual Wednesday night custom, he comes over for a nice home-cooked meal and tonight he was spoiled with Janet's famous oyster soup. This is probably Janet's "signature" dish, you can only make it if you have access to fresh oysters and if you were to buy a whole batch of fresh oysters, why the hell would you bother to make soup out of them? Rather just eat them fresh!
I opened 18 oysters for the soup and while Janet was busy with that I opened another 12 for me and Frank to enjoy;
The four on the top left I left fresh, sprinkled with lemon juice, a couple of drops of tobasco sauce and some ground black pepper, in the centre I did the same recipe as the other evening; a dribble of brandy, a teaspoon of cream and some blue cheese and top right, also brandy and cream but with crumbled feta cheese and some dried olives sprinkled over. These last two batches I baked under the grill for about fifteen minutes until the cheese was melted and the oysters had cooked.
Frank was to be my guinea pig, I have only done these for myself before although many people have had Janet's oyster soup and have raved over it, he was to be the first to taste my version of "Oysters Rockerfeller" which I had in an East London restaurant many years ago.
The moment of truth, he's a finnicky old bugger and it wasn't so long ago that he didn't even eat oysters, I introduced him to that gastronomic pleasure. Here he slips one of the baked oysters from the shell.
Need I say more? He actually said that both varieties of the cooked oysters were better than the fresh! I must say that the brandy, cream, feta cheese and olives worked particularly well and Janet's oyster soup was again to die for, what an evening!
If you fancy some of that let me know, come on over and I'll cook some oysters for you. 

4 comments:

Geoff James said...

Andrew,
There are commercial oyster beds in the harbour straight out from our house. I adore them in any shape or form but Jennie describes them as "phlegm in a shell", so you can judge what she thinks about them!!!

the rider said...

Yes Geoff that's pretty much the way Janet feels about them too, she's in the lucky situation where she could eat oysters every day if she wanted to - she had some soup but that's all.

BeemerGirl said...

I'll put in my reservation now please. :) Love baked oysters on the half shell. Only eat them out of the bay in Florida...fresh, fresh, fresh! Butter and parmesan cheese. Yum.

-Lori

the rider said...

Hi Lori, yes I eat them fresh most of the time but I love to experiment with them, I have also smoked them - delicious!