Oyster Blog — Store News

This spring we put on our mad scientist hats and headed into the woods. Our prey: fir needles. Our purpose: jelly. The fir-jelly project was a long time coming. We discovered that fir needles were edible a few years ago, after reading about a Douglas-fir-Champagne sorbet made (once!) by our friends at Olympic Mountain Ice Cream. Since then, we've been following the world of tree-needle-cuisine from afar... scoping the occasional blog post or Herbfarm dinner menu for recipe ideas. New growth on Douglas-fir trees in the spring: When we finally got around to cooking fir tips, it took us a...

Chef Ron Stainer of the Hog Island Oyster Bar in Napa came up with this smoked oyster recipe in honor of our guest shucking appearance a few weeks back. Think of it as a smoked oyster salad over toast. The pickled onions and arugula really showcase the smokiness of the oysters, and the crunchy crostini sets everything off perfectly. Ingredients: One crusty baguette, cut on the diagonal into medium-thick slices, good for toasting. One dozen Hama Hama Hot Smoked Oysters, sliced medium-thin, on the diagonal. Variety of your choice. 4 marinated Piquillo peppers, sliced thin on the diagonal. One whole red...

1. Oyster Stout 2012 is brewing! 2. Adam gains a pretty impressive title. No, we did not write this ourselves. Hopefully this world is big enough for two oyster kings. 3. More about the above: Seattle's Bastille Restaurant (in Ballard) is featuring Hama Hamas in their new Monday- Wednesday oyster happy hour. The newly-crowned Oyster King and other friends will be shucking and yapping at the Bastille on Wednesday, February 1st. 4. Lastly: our aquarium has officially come back from the dead. The poor little tank was sadly neglected over the summer and actually filled up with worms. The worms...

Native blue mussels are smaller than their Mediterranean counterparts, but just as tasty. They're flash mob mussels: some years there are hardly any on the beach, then the next year they're everywhere. Occasionally, just for fun, they aren't blue at all, but golden. Every now and again, a customer comes into the store with her heart set on mussels, and refuses to be comforted by steamers or oysters. So in 2009 we went big into mussels... for one week... and fell flat on our face because they didn't sell. Also, we were keeping them in the live tanks, which allowed...

We're getting a little artsy around here, and have been trying our hands at creating Santa Claus ornaments out of oyster shells. Above is an awesome and slightly frightening Santa that Helena created a couple of years ago. Excuse the dust and dog hair (?) on this otherwise very sophisticated gentleman... he may or may not have spent a couple of years forgotten behind the TV case. So far, nothing we've created this year has managed to match the old Santa's gravitas... but we're working on it. Oyster Fan's Santa on top, Kara's on bottom: She makes a mean Santa....