Oysters Rockefeller Re-cap

Not to be outdone with the last minute blog posting, here's a recap of our original attempt at P&J's Oyster Rockefeller. (and Sazeracs!)

Ei-Lun and I had decided to team up with John and Lee and cook all of the homework at once (except the Étouffée) at their place in the south bay. There was also a concept where John and I were supposed to be working on a few of my wedding to-do list items, but I seem to mostly recall shopping, drinking, cooking, and eating... a lot; and not exactly checking any items off the wedding list. (website, tux rental) Here's my best effort at recalling that day's activities, with the help of John and Ei-Lun's photo logs!

Shopping
I'm pretty sure we hit at least four stores to complete the shopping, which was reasonable since we were cooking three of the four recipes for the cooking club. We ended up going to ranch to get the Oysters. We picked up one of the mesh bags full of Oysters; selection criteria was mostly about "buying whatever they had," vs. doing any inspection. We bought blocks of frozen spinach, the veggies, and Ei-Lun and Lee would later run to the store to pick up the Pecorino-Romano cheese for the oyster toppings.

Prep and drinking
Preparation was pretty easy, which included thawing out the spinach blog in boiling water, cutting up the veggies and grating the cheese. Also, a quick note about the Sazerac, which was attempted a few times that evening:

I first had this drink on the suggestion of my friend Lester, who kept sending me text messages about the "Sazerac happy hour" in SF, I think @ Epic Roasthouse... I didn't know the drink at the time, but looked up the recipe on-line and decided I would probably like it given the ingredients: Rye whiskey, some sugar, bitters, absinthe. Also the drink had a lot of history and is arguably one of the original cocktails, had a cool name, and had that mysterious "absinthe" in it.

The Sazerac is actually super easy to make. It's an all-alcohol drink so its fairly strong. The biggest surprise for me was that the absinthe is only used to coat the inside of the serving glass, and is then dumped out. (!!) We used a sugar cube, added bitters and muddled; then added the Rye Whiskey. Stir, then pour into the glass that was coated with the absinthe. Done! (check out this youtube vid from chow.com which now has me searching for Rittenhouse Rye...)

Ok where were we...

Shucking and Cooking
Shucking the oysters wasn't too difficult once I got the hang of it. The thing I remember most about this part of the recipe was that we didn't rinse off the oysters before shucking and there were these little bugs jumping out of the exterior of the shells while shucking which was kind of gross. Next time, we'd rinse off the oysters prior, or we'd get them from a place that had them in water!

The process was to shuck, save the nice looking shells, and deposit the oyster and its "liquor" into the pan for the stove. We did rinse off the shells before placing them down on the bed of rock salt.





Once the oysters were poached, they went back in to the shells, and got a topping of the cheese/spinach mixture.








Next the oysters headed to the oven. Before & After pictures, can you tell the difference?








Enjoying
And that was it! Out of the oven they were very hot. The melted cheese topping was very tasty and the oysters were quite nice as well. Note that we had 15 of these bad boys for only four people... Basically we wanted to use all the oysters in the bag, but I think one or two per person is more than enough. It's like an entire meal in one of these things.

Eating these, and having the Sazerac, reminded me of being in New Orleans, enjoying the food and the drinks. So I would say "mission accomplished." Looking forward to having them again tomorrow! (...today!)