My days in Greece went something like this: wake up, put on bathing suit, make some random plan for going somewhere, walk down to the hotel lobby, and encounter someone else who will change my plans completely. Sometimes that was good, and sometimes it was very, very good.

The sea urchins were one of the latter cases. When I walked downstairs, I looked out on the veranda and saw Fani, my godmother, hard at work with a couple of her friends.

The funny thing was just how merry she looked about what seemed to be a really disgusting enterprise. They were cleaning a big tray of sea urchins. That involved, Fani explained, cutting out the soft “eye” on the bottom with scissors, then scraping all this brown jiggly goo out, while leaving the good part intact. All this while not stabbing yourself with the pointy bits.

They did look beautiful when they were done:

I’d never seen the inside of a sea urchin, and the only place I’d encountered the stuff before was as a big jiggly orange blob on a plate in Japanese restaurants, where it has come to be the ballsiest thing to order after chicken sashimi. I once read a (favorable) description of eating sea urchin as “like going down on a mermaid.” This whole sexier/cooler/bad-asser-than-thou posturing has no place in food, I think, and the one time I ate sea urchin, I was annoyed at the gung-ho attitude at the table. Maybe I was just being contrary when I said, “Enh.” Like a lot of Japanese food, it seemed to be a lot about the texture–or whether you can ignore the texture, which is silky and slithery and a lot like barely cooked brains.

But seeing these little sea urchins in their natural state, as sparkling orange stars laid out in black shells, I could see the appeal. They looked even more appealing when placed next to a bottle of ouzo:

The other accompaniment was fresh-baked bread, with which we were to scoop out the insides.

So, we dug in. The orange goo, smeared on the bread, was sweet and salty, delicate but also unmissable. It got a little more missable as I drank more ouzo, but before that, I was astounded by the tender, full flavor.

I was also touched at the extent to which humans will go to find something tasty. Around the table there was a glee that could not be credited completely to the ouzo. It was also sheer delight that we humans had once again succeeded in foraging. We had used our exceptional cunning to find, in the most unlikely of places, something not just edible but delicious. We’d won against these sea urchins, and that was cause for celebration.

Just a few weeks later, I got the same feeling at a crab feast in Baltimore, but that’s yet another story.