Karl’s birthday oysters were so good that I couldn’t really think of a good story to tell about them–no last-second genius rejiggering, no harrowing run-ins with the law, no panicked this-will-never-work tantrums, no fires raging out of control. I still haven’t really drummed anything clever up. Everything went as planned. It was great. Pictures are over on Fotaq.

But it was so dang easy, I recommend it to all, and here’s how:

Ingredients: Fresh oysters. Tons. Some clams? Why not? I bet mussels would work too.

Ours weren’t even as fresh as could be, because we bought them at 2am Thurs night/Fri morn and didn’t eat till Sunday. But they were perfectly good. Store the oysters in your fridge, not in ice–the fresh water drowns ’em. Dapper Dan was speculating that perhaps really good oyster joints store their oysters in big brine tanks, to replicate the sea, because the oysters are so firm and plump and gushing liquid when you get them. So if you have a saltwater aquarium, use that; otherwise, just the fridge.

For cooking, we’d initially planned to lightly steam them over the fire, rigging up a hotel pan with a little bit of water, topping it with a cookie sheet (there’s a pic of me messing with this). But then DD kept saying we’d be much happier if we just put the things straight on the grill. We were. This way, we could feed the fire steadily (we had a bundle of green applewood Ali had given us, which maybe made the oysters taste better…but it sure made the air smell nice). We could also keep an eye on all of them and pull them off as soon as they popped, which only took a couple of minutes. The oysters barely opened a crack, but the clams would occasionally pop wide open–in general, they were easier to spot. Some oysters sat sullenly, not opening, for ages, and then finally would creep open. Some of those I didn’t trust and tossed, suspecting they might be dead already, but the rest we ate, and we were all fine. I don’t think we ended up overcooking any of them. They were also pretty easy to pop open–no hard-core shucking tools needed.

We served them with a mignonette–shallots, parsley, red wine vin and tons of black pepper–but I think they would’ve been just as good with plain old lemon juice and pepper. We also had a schmancy Asian version, with yuzu vinegar and cucumber, but that one needed a little work, I think. The _real_ tasty secret to serving them was that DD was just fishing them out of their shells with his fingers, sloshing them in the mignonette, and feeding them to anyone in range. Everything tastes better when you eat it with your fingers, and it turns out some things taste even better when you use someone else’s fingers.

Apparently, too, you can’t eat too many. Karine said she must’ve served up two dozen at least just to Karl’s brother, and was beginning to feel like the irresponsible bar owner continuing to serve the obviously wasted patron. But no complaints the next day…

The star “side” dish was the pulled pork–just pork shoulder cooked at 250 for, like, 14 hours. Tamara wedged four of them in the same hotel pan, rubbed all over with some redneck-y premade supermarket spice blend (rec’d by a real redneck), and they turned out insanely well. So well that it was all gone at the end of the party, so Tamara had to make another shoulder the next night just to console herself. Strangely, though, it was not as delicious–for two reasons, I think: the pork was not pulled to obsessive fineness by Naomi, who did a stellar job on the first batch, and it was also cooked all by its lonesome, without three other slabs of greasy pig oozing flavorful fat, so it didn’t have quite the same richness and was a tad dry. So I guess the lesson is just to add some lard.

For dessert, we had red velvet cake and ice cream from Mary’s Dairy–turns out the owner is semi-related to Karl. As if Karl wasn’t a keeper enough.

I’m already in a swoon from describing all that salty, slippery, fatty goodness–and I didn’t even get to the crab cakes. Holy shit, they were awesome. As Peter promised, I have a whole new outlook on the whole crab cake genre. And like any really good drug, just after I had the last one, I found myself plotting how I would get more: probably will go to DC next month…so I could stop off in Baltimore…take the streetcar…Chris could meet me…we could drive back. I’m hooked. If you see me panhandling under a bridge this time next year, please give crabs and butter.