Oyster Mignonette

I will indeed post the Block Island portion of my most recent adventure, but for now — this is just a recipe for an oyster mignonette.

Spoon feeding oysters one at a time

After eating oysters a few times during this recent trip, I surfed around (the internet, not the ocean) and came up with ideas for a sauce to go with the oysters.  Yes, you can just squeeze lemon onto them — and that is an awesome choice.  You can splash a dab of Tabasco or some other hot sauce on them, and I like that, too.  You can use cocktail sauce (tomato ketchup and horseradish) or just plain horseradish.  Yum.

But this past weekend I discovered something called “Mignonette”.

The essential recipe turns out to be vinegar and finely diced shallots.  Anything else is gravy (as it were).   But a lot of restaurants apparently will riff off of this basic.  Think of it as salad dressing without the oil.

So, since I brought home 0.4 pounds of shucked oysters from Chaplin’s (I bought them out of any remaining stock…), I decided to come up with my own Mignonette, based on a surfing through the Internet, and considering what was already in my own larder.

Here we go, and it really did work for me, but mind you, I didn’t truly measure anything:

1/4 cup red wine vinegar
Juice from 1/3rd of a good lime
1.5 finely diced slices of onion (shallot would be preferred, dice up about half of one; but as I did not go out to shop….  anyhow, shallot OR onion)
Fresh cilantro, roughly chopped and to taste.  (Dill might be a nice alternative for the Cilantro-disliking…)

Let everything except the cilantro soak together overnight.

Add the cilantro before use.

Cilantro just added, you can splash them around a bit.  Or chop more coarsely.  

Oysters 

If you have the oyster in its shell, all the best.  Personally, I simply know I’d get a knife through my palm eventually, should I attempt shucking them myself.  I ate them one at a time from a spoon.  Don’t discard the oyster liquor.  With another spoon, add about 1/4-1/2 teaspoon of the mignonette to each oyster, making sure to include some of the shallots / onions.

I also tried this with slices of conch (cooked), and that was good, too.  I am going to toss the little that remains over my salad, tomorrow.

Foreclosure & Eviction: The sad tale of a conch

Advertisement