crabby cashier

Oyster shells down your shirt is not fun.  

Helping male customers who know more about fish than I do isn't fun either.  I prefer to help women who don't care about exact weights and say, 'just wrap that piece up, that one right there in the front.'  No trimming, no removing skin...no reweighing...still, it's better than having money thrown at you at the register and having to pick up casually discarded receipts from the floor.  What can you do...

Equipped with a shucking knife, I got a lesson in prying open fresh Miagi oysters farmed in Tomales Bay.  With a towel as a buffer insert the blade into the hinge end and twist to loosen the shell.  It took all of my minimal arm strength and several shards of shell down my sweatshirt until each punctured shell yielded with a satisfying soda can pop.

According to Bioscience Magazine, the majority of native oyster bays are “functionally extinct.” The Center for Biological Diversity claims oyster the die-offs along the Oregon and Washington coasts are the direct result of ocean acidification caused by higher CO2 emissions.

Nearly all of the oysters consumed globally are farmed.  With a natural filtering system, these mollusks are ideally suited for aquaculture.  High in iron and potassium, oysters are commonly known as aphrodisiacs due to high concentrations of zinc.  Buy shellfish live.  When agitated, clams and mussels will close.  Cook until the shells open and discard those that don’t.

…

“How are you with a cleaver?” Miserably I looked from Pete to a pair of cooked crabs waiting on the chopping block.  Two deliveries had arrived within five minutes of each other, it was lunchtime and there was crowd of customers waiting to be served.  No time to be squeamish.

The rule of the fish department: keep it simple, do it, do it right and do it fast.  With practiced ease, the rest of the crew calmly filled orders, sidestepping delivery boxes and dodging bits of fish gut sailing into trash bins.

“Just follow me,” said Pete, deftly disconnecting the crab’s body from the top shell.  My shaking hands did nothing to speed the dissection, scraping off gills and twisting off mouthpieces.  Once the remaining guts were sprayed away, legs were snapped off and cracked with a series of well-placed taps of a mallet and the body cleaved into six pieces.  Time to help the next customer.