Tuatua Clams and Cockles: A Shellfish Cooking Adventure
As in the movie, Forrest Gump, there are many ways to cook shellfish (as in the variety of cooking shrimp):
boil, broil, fry, deep fry, soup (Asian, Continental, American..etc) raw (not recommended) chowder mixed in with other spices and goodies like potatoes, use with noodles or just as a main and ofcourse my favorite cooked up to a point and eaten as pate' mixed with some good ol' sweet chilli sauce.
Accordingly in respect of the biodiversity, Adeline and myself cooly collected....200+ shellfish. A combination of cockles and tuatua clams. We stopped counting at 200 but we know it was less than 300 because hey....how much shellfish can one eat anyways? On an added note, by New Zealand law, your'e only allowed 150 per person and judging from the picture, it is definitely less than 300....so I think we're safe.
Once we collected the shellfish, there was the cleaning and pre-cooking procedures we had to follow because god knows, if one of us falls sick...uh oh! Here's a good website we followed on how to clean shellfish so that one's culinary adventure can be fulfilled: http://www.ehow.com/how_2074892_clean-clams.html
Since last time we caught the shellfish, we have made: oyster omlettes (Malaysian Hokkien hor chien...my fav!), Shellfish curry and last but not least pasta ala shellfish...also not to forget there's the occasional boiled shellfish and eaten with sweet chilli sauce. Unfortunately, what we should have done was to clean the shellfish in hot water and not leave them too long. So basically, we had a full load of cooked shellfish and it tasted rather....rubbery...tasted good though. The picture above is the cooked shellfish that was boiled and where me and adeline ate with the sweet chilli sauce (rojak sauce) used for asian fruit salads. Unfortunately, what we should have done was taken pictures of the dished we made with the shellfish. Oops!
Yummy! Till next time....theALBERTUS signing off!










