Fish

IdleRich

IdleRich
Yeah they're mad for em here, I love em. Goose barnacles in English cos at one point they thought they grew into geese!

You hold the talon and pull the skin off, eat the flesh underneath, taste a little like oysters to my mind.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
They are expensive cos they are sort of dangerous to harvest I think, have to pull them off rocks as the sea exposes them and then rushes back in.... but you liked right? I want percebes now
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Loved them, a bit like those razor clams you get but with a lot more flavour, plus they were nice and easy to eat. There are still 3 oysters left in the fridge cos nobody could open the fuckers, my partner nearly nearly cut her fingers off grappling with one of them. I mean they're tasty but not really worth maiming yourself over.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
the other thing about lobster is the cooking method: dropping live ones into a pot of boiling water. the ultimate cruelty, at least other fish or animals are already dead before reaching the restaurant or market. some seafood restaurants here have a big fish tank, and you can select the live lobster that will be on your dinner plate a half-hour later.

Yeah very common here, the best seafood restaurants will have a lobster tank and another tank for the lobsters with no claws (spiny lobster I think) and another for crab. They will have numerous types of prawns laid out on ice as well as oysters and percebes and so on. The most expensive by weight are either the percebes (as discussed) or the giant tiger prawns (fair enough they are almost as big as a small lobster and have more meat for the size) or possibly scarlet shrimp. You're supposed to make sure you suck out all the brains and the eyes and stuff when you eat the latter, I guess to get some value for your money.

Scarlet.jpeg


It's kinda confusing when talking about this cos people use the names differently. They sell crayfish in a lot of places (also very expensive) but that's the sea thing from Nordic waters. We do have the invasive species here and apparently there are lakes where you can catch loads by putting a lamp to attract them and just grabbing them when they come, but I've never seen them in a restaurant.

One thing I've only had once is a bruxa (which means witch) shrimp. In a restaurant called appropriately enough Sea of Hell (Mar do Inferno). Despite looking basically like a cockroach they were very tasty (and, yeah, very expensive).

Bruxas.jpeg
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Oysters are one of the only things that are more expensive in Portugal than in the UK. When I lived in Hackney there was a restaurant round the corner that had ten different types of oyster and they were a pound each at certain times, you just wrote how many of each type you wanted and they kept bringing them, there was also a shot with an oyster and tabasco in it, really fucking nice. In Portugal you can pretty much never get an oyster for less than 2 euros.
 
Oysters are one of the only things that are more expensive in Portugal than in the UK. When I lived in Hackney there was a restaurant round the corner that had ten different types of oyster and they were a pound each at certain times, you just wrote how many of each type you wanted and they kept bringing them, there was also a shot with an oyster and tabasco in it, really fucking nice. In Portugal you can pretty much never get an oyster for less than 2 euros.

Day 287 of not knowing what to do with this information.
 
Don't get me started!

Gorging himself on oysters, blinking out their bivalve souls, £1 at a time, neutralizing their corruption in a spangled maelstrom of recreational drugs and gut juice.

And all the while, millions of people in the Global South, one bony hand outheld in pleading, the other rubbing their kwashiorkored bellies in want.
 
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