October and Oysters

Timeless celebrations of the bivalve

October is National Seafood Month and since it is also my birthday month we celebrated both at Zola's on Saturday night with delicious raw oysters from the Hood Canal in Washington. Briny, crisp and delicious, we ate them with just a squeeze of lemon juice and wondered about who might have been the first person to crack open what looks like a rock and slurp down the delicious morsel inside. As Jonathan Swift said, "He was a bold man that first eat an oyster."

According to Rowan Jacobsen in his 2009 book "The Living Shore," oysters are the food that made us human. "Our complex brains require tremendous amounts of energy and very   particular nutrients, especially docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), the most important of the omega-3 fatty acids.  DHA, which is abundant only in fish and shellfish, is behind fish's 'brain food' reputation. It is used to build the cell membranes in the brain and to optimize the connections between neurons. It determines how fast our microprocessors run."

My sister Mary sent photos from yesterday's National Oyster Shucking competition in Leonardtown, MD.  Louisiana resident Duke Landry (in yellow), won his second consecutive Championship in 2015 with a composite score of 2:16.76. That's a speedy shucker!