What do you do when a friend asks to do something out of the ordinary?
Oyster Hunting!
We read somewhere on the Internet, the South West part of our country (Province of 'Zeeland' in the Netherlands) has some very good spots to collect fresh oysters, directly from the sea. And we also learned, this is all legal, meaning we don't need any permit or license to collect oysters.
Sounded like a very fun thing to do!
And maybe the oysters do taste good as well!?
We prepared ourselves a bit for the hunt, collected the necessary tools: bucket to put the oysters into - we took three buckets to be prepared to take a whole lot oysters back home - hammer and screwdriver for the heavy 'cut' work, watertight gloves to protect our hands, watertight boots to keep our feet dry, and several oyster knives to be able to eat our breakfast as fresh as possible.
We didn't know how popular oysters hunting is, and we also needed low tight, so we decided to leave very early in order for us to arrive at 'Het Sas' - the spot we selected from a list of 5 spots advised by oysters collectors - while the low tight was still in creation.
Just before we left, I had to take this picture; The moon through the tree in front of my bedroom window, at 7am in the morning.
I can tell you, in real-life this picture was a whole lot more beautiful and gave some kind of total relaxation feeling when looking at it. Ok, but we had no time to waste, so after 10 minutes watching and dreaming, I took the photo and we jumped into our car.
We had a lot of luck that day, beautiful sky, room for the sun to show itself to us, giving us all the extra good mood one can get.
The highway...
The country road leading to the place to be 'Het Sas'...
...just beautiful, and so early in the morning, everybody was still sleeping therefore the world was extra quite and peaceful...
...and then: HET SAS...
NOBODY there! Really? Are we the only ones? Don't people want to get oysters for free while in the fish shop they cost 1 Euro and more a piece and in restaurant maybe even double to triple the price? Or, are all oysters gone, or just not tasteful enough? Lots of question we had, so best to just start hunting...
Along to way to the (more or less) natural created pier, we saw this one, an yellyfish...
I thought: "This one is in perfect condition to collect and create some leather from it". A thought I would not have had, when I would not have researched jellyfish based leather earlier last year. When you are interested, I wrote an article about it (here).
We found - by far - the most oysters at the pier and were pretty surprised to see so many of them, most of them still closed and probably alive. Still we were the only souls around!
These oysters would not make it in nature anymore, they were destined for our buckets...
Many of the oysters were holding each other pretty tight, like this group. We took these apart with our tools, hammer and screwdriver, and also they landed in our buckets...
One of our buckets...
Thats I! In between the hunting, I needed a little bit of dream time...
But more importantly, our breakfast. I, trying to open one...
...with success...
...and another one
In less then two hours we managed to fill three buckets. Ate at least a dozen oysters each. Time to move back home and figure out - along the way - how we would eat our entire catch.
Our last view of the hunting grounds...
On the way back, Donar/Thor decided to show his face a little, resulting in this...
I couldn't resist, this is one of the biggest highway tunnels we have in the Netherlands, it is close to Rotterdam harbour, a massive harbour for cargo ships to unload and load all sort of stuff we important and export. Before the Chinese started to build their massive harbours, Rotterdam harbour was the biggest harbour in the whole world. By now the Chinese have bigger ones. Still, Rotterdam harbour is used a LOT to distribute goods to whole of Europe, as well as to funnel goods from Europe to travel to anywhere in the world.
While driving, we called some of our friends. We would never be able to eat the 100+ oysters ourselves. They can be stored in the fridge, and in theory survive about 7 days, but oysters are always the best when they are as fresh as possible.
My best friend was with her parents in the woods at the time I called her. Although they planned to stay for the rest of the day; They immediately decided to change their plans and come straight to Amsterdam.
And then it became very quiet on the photo front. Too occupied with cleaning and opening the oysters, we simply didn't had any time to make photographs.
Tips
Eating oysters the traditional way is simply with some lemon juice and optionally some grounded pepper. Add to it Champagne and more traditional you cannot get. To flavour it up, try to add some soya sauce. We made a spicy soya sauce - with some peppers in it - and mixed this with lemon. Later in the week, I was still eating oysters, but just to be sure, I grilled them. Many recipes can be found on the Internet, but I like things simple, so I added some butter to each oyster before I put the tray in the oven, hit the grill mode for about two to three minutes, and ready to eat with again a little bit of lemon juice.