Not that I can’t see its utility. Here’s a cooking technique that renders just about anything not only edible but delicious, which is a real boon in time of scarcity. If you’re stranded on a dessert island with nothing to eat but tubers and shoe leather, all you have to do is fire up the deep fryer and you’re good to go. It’s the only thing on this earth that will turn tree bark into dinner.

It’s also the thing on this earth that will make tree bark bad for you. The only problem with the deep fryer is that the things that come out of it are A) absolutely irresistible and B) woefully unhealthful. That’s a dangerous combination.

Les Hemmila, oysterman, on his farm

It’s so dangerous that, for the first 47 years of my life, I refused to deep fry anything at all. Which is not to say that I refused to eat anything deep-fried. I’m particularly fond of fried shrimp, and I’ve downed my share of French fries – it’s just that I thought it was safer to keep that kind of thing out of the house.

But then we met Les Hemmila. Les runs Barnstable Seafarms, and grows beautiful oysters on grants in Barnstable Harbor and West Bay, off Osterville. If you farm oysters, you aim to grow them until they’re three inches long, which is the minimum legal size and also the size people want in a raw oyster. Inevitably, though, some get away. They get sloshed out of their trays and go rogue, and if they escape harvest for a season or two, they turn into big, hairy monsters that nobody wants.

Except me. Kevin sometimes helps Les out on the grant, and I occasionally come along. We were out there a couple days ago, and I marveled at the size of some of Les’s escapees.

“What do you do with these?” I asked him.

“Nothing,” he said. “If you want ‘em, you’re welcome to ‘em.”

Our dozen monsters

I wanted ‘em. I collected a dozen, and took ‘em home.

There are several things you can do with oversized oysters. There’s nothing to stop you from eating them raw, of course, but they’re better suited for other applications. One of which is deep frying.

It was a just a couple months back that we deep fried some oysters with our friends Doug and Dianne Langelend – inveterate eaters, accomplished cooks, and publishers of Edible Cape Cod. We shucked the oysters and breaded them (flour, then egg, then panko), and Doug set up an outdoor propane burner with an enameled cast-iron Le Creuset pot full of vegetable oil.

When Kevin saw the set-up, his eyes lit up. We have an outdoor propane burner! We have an enameled cast-iron pot! (Ours is a mere Lodge, not a Le Creuset, but the principle’s the same.) All we need is vegetable oil, and deep frying is within our grasp.

“I know what you’re thinking,” I said to my husband, and I almost added something along the lines of “and you can forget about it,” but I stopped to consider.

Kevin and I each have three marital vetoes. That is, we can each put our foot down and put the kibosh on something the other wants to do a total of three times over the course of our married life. I have exercised one, and Kevin has resigned himself to motorcyclelessness. Kevin has exercised none. This could be because he’s more easy-going and live-and-let-live than I am, or it could be because I don’t ever want to do anything that has to be vetoed.

Regardless, I have two vetoes left. As I stood on the Langelands’ patio, watching the wheels turn in my husband’s head, I decided I wasn’t going to waste one on deep frying.

Our first deep frying ever

And so, yesterday, I broke my 47-year streak and deep fried at home.

Kevin set up the burner, and put about a half-gallon of canola oil in our cast-iron pot. We shucked the oysters (no mean feat) and drained them. And then we called my parents.

My parents love to eat, but they are also very careful about what they eat. The meals they have at home are invariably heavy on vegetables, legumes, and whole grains and light on meat and fat. They’re also very good – my mother is an excellent cook.

Although I tend to make reasonably healthful meals most of the time, it’s usually when we do something a little out of the ordinary that we invite my parents over. And “out of the ordinary” generally translates to “bad for you.”

I called my mother. “Hey, Mom, it’s me. We’re having crack for dinner. Wanna come over?”

“Sure! We’ll bring the wine.”

They arrived, with wine, and Kevin fired up the propane burner. We breaded the oysters (flour, egg, panko), and I made an aioli out of mayonnaise, garlic, lemon juice, and Tabasco.

Mom and Dad, blurry from all the excitement

When the oil was hot, we dropped in the first four oysters. They cooked in about fifteen seconds, and Kevin scooped them out and drained them on paper towels.

We each took one, and dipped it in the aioli.

There is nothing like a fried oyster. The outside is crispy and crunchy, the inside soft and creamy. It has the faintest brininess. It’s like deep-fried ocean.

There is no going back. We have crossed our deep-fried Rubicon, and are now thinking about chicken, shrimp, and even Snickers bars. Kevin pointed to the potato patch, one of our few gardening endeavors that seems to be succeeding, and said to me. “You see those? Those are French fries.”

I’m eyeing the tree bark.

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Florence suiting up for oystering

Florence has an oyster grant, a two-acre parcel in the flats of Barnstable Harbor earmarked as her oyster farm. It’s dry at low tide, underwater at high tide, and marked out by buoys. She grows oysters in part because she owns The Naked Oyster, arguably the best restaurant on this end of the Cape, and in part because she’ll do anything.

Florence is French, but not in an effete, Chanel-wearing kind of way. Florence is tough and intrepid, both of which qualities come in handy for oyster farming, especially this past week.

This was the week the oysters had to come out of the harbor. Because the water generally freezes over the course of the winter, and the ice floes can crush both the oysters and cages used to contain them, the whole shebang has to come out before winter hits in earnest.

For Florence’s operation, which only uses a small portion of her two-acre allotment, that’s about three days of cold, heavy work. Two of them had been done when she called Monday morning to see how Kevin was.

She was concerned about him because, in the course of helping her son Julien with the oysters the day before, he’d fallen in the water and come to the brink of hypothermia. I’d put him in a hot shower as soon as he’d come home, and put clothes in the dryer so they’d be warm when he got out. In an hour or so, he’d been fine, which is what I told her.

“Don’t you still have work to do out there?” I asked her.

She told me they did. And that, given the weather forecast, this was probably the last day to do it.

“Do you need help?”

She told me, essentially, that our household had already made the maximum allowable contribution to the oystering effort. I told her that was nonsense, and I’d be there, suited up, when she was ready to go out.

We set off at about 1:30 in the afternoon. It was me, Florence, and two young, strong, boat-savvy guys, Jeff and Drew, recruited for the purpose. We took her boat, a small Carolina Skiff, as well as a slightly larger one she’d borrowed from a friend, and went out on the meandering path to the grant.

Barnstable Harbor is shallow, and its many sandbars make it difficult to navigate at low tide, even in the flat-bottom skiffs used for oystering. We took a serpentine route around the shallowest spots, and we probably only drafted a little over a foot, but we still had to tilt the motor up several times to get through. We did get through, though, and arrived at the grant some time around 2:00.

Then we had to make a decision about where to put the boats. The central conundrum of this kind of oystering is that low tide is the best time for the work, but high tide is the best time for the boats. The oysters are on dry land at low tide, and you can walk around the grant, doing what you have to do. You want the oysters on dry land. Not so the boats.

When we got there, the oysters were high and dry, and we could get the boats within about thirty yards of them. But the tide was still going out, and the spot where we had them would be dry soon.

“We should keep the boats floating,” Florence warned.

I’d checked the tide, and dead low was at about 2:30. I thought that, if we left the boats where they were, we’d be significantly into the flood by the time we finished the work (which I thought would take about an hour and a half), and the boats would be afloat again, even with their heavy loads.

If we wanted to keep the boats afloat, we would have to put them about twice as far from the oysters, which had unpleasant implications for how far we’d have to carry each load. We left them where they were, and started loading.

Oysters at low tide

There are several different techniques for farming oysters. Florence begins with the seed oysters in bags. When they’re big enough, she transfers them to flat wire trays, each about two feet by three feet and holding several hundred oysters. The bigger the oysters are, the more the trays weigh. Most of the oysters we needed to move were approaching legal (three-inch) size, and the trays probably weighed between twenty and forty pounds each.

The work didn’t take as long as I thought, though, mostly because I didn’t factor in just how much lifting and carrying two young, strong guys can do. Florence and I aren’t sissies, but we are middle-aged women There’s just no substitute for being male and twenty-three.

By 2:45 we had the oysters and cages stacked in the boats, ready to go. But something was wrong. The tide was still going out. How could that be? Tides have been well understood for centuries. Tide charts aren’t wrong.

“How could the tide still be going out?” I asked Florence, with some indignation. “The chart said low tide was 2:30.”

“It depends on exactly where you are, and the wind,” she told me, with a shrug. “It’s unpredictable out here.”

“We should have kept the boats floating,” I said ruefully.

There was nothing to do but wait.

If it hadn’t been getting darker and windier by the moment, waiting wouldn’t have been a problem.

Fully loaded, high and dry

We watched the water, we watched the sky. Finally, at some time well after three, the tide turned. Ten minutes later, water was lapping at our stranded boats. The level slowly crept up until we were able to get the smaller boat to float. But the big one sat stubbornly in the sand.

We pushed it, we rocked it, we redistributed the cargo. It moved, but it was stuck on some kind of lump of sand that just wouldn’t give up its hold. The sun was setting, the wind was blowing. My fingers were beginning to get cold. We pushed some more.

Finally, it came loose. “Let’s get going,” Florence said, and she yanked on the pull-start of the motor. Nothing.

A litany of everything that could go wrong was going through my mind, and it started with a failed motor. From there, it went on to swamping, stranding, hypothermia, and even drowning. We’ve got overloaded boats in an increasing chop. It’s too dark to see the sandbars. The temperature’s dropping fast. We’re all wearing waders – which are the last thing you want to wear if you fall in because they fill with water and drag you down.

I knew at the time that most of my fear was unreasonable. We had two boats, and there were several others out there, so help would be at hand in case of a mishap. The harbor wasn’t more than about six feet deep at the deepest spot we’d be going over. The wind was behind us. Although it was getting cold, we were properly dressed and dry. The likelihood that something could go catastrophically wrong was very, very slim. But fear and reason are strangers to each other.

Florence pulled the starter again, and again nothing.

“Do you want me to have a go?” I asked.

She didn’t want me to have a go. She wanted to start the bloody thing herself. She hated the idea that she was having trouble pulling it hard enough, accustomed as she was to being able to do everything that needed doing. But this was the third day she’d been doing this work, and she was depleted.

“Give it a try,” she said.

I pulled, hard, and the motor turned over. She and I got in, and Jeff and Drew followed us in the bigger boat. It was slow going. The boats were heavy, and the prop on the other boat was so worn down that its top speed was about three knots. The water came within inches of the gunwales, and Florence was navigating from memory, since the water was too dark to see the shallow spots.

Not only was Florence in complete control of the situation, and confident in a successful outcome, she even had the bandwidth to reassure me that all was well. It’s not like I told her I was scared. I wanted desperately to be brave and intrepid, and I was doing my best to be cheerful and positive. It was probably the white knuckles that gave me away.

The oysters' winter home

I could see car headlights shining from the ramp at Scudder Lane, and it crossed my mind that Kevin might be there to meet us. I’d told him I was going out, and he would have known there’d be unloading to do.

He was there, and I was mighty glad to see him.

We pulled the boats in, loaded the oysters and gear into the three pick-up trucks we had, and brought them to the restaurant. There, Florence’s staff helped us get them into the refrigerated truck where they’d be dormant over the winter.

When the work was done, Florence made us drinks of whiskey, lemon, and hot water. “I’m sorry you had to go out on one of the hardest days,” she said.

“Hey, it was fine,” I told her. “We got all the oysters in, nobody was hurt, and I’m sitting here with a hot drink in my hands.” And then, after a pause. “Were you scared at all?”

She shook her head. “I don’t really get scared,” she said. “If I’m scared, we’re probably going down.”

Kevin’s that way, too. Are you born that way, or do you get that way? I want to be that way.

I can’t decide whether I want to stick with oystering along the beach with my bucket and rake, or get my own oyster grant in the hope that it will make me that way.

“Next time, we’ll go out in the summer,” Florence said. “We’ll bring a cooler full of ice, and some really good white wine, and we’ll sit out there on a warm, sunny day and drink wine and eat oysters.”

All in all, I don’t think I want an oyster grant. I just want a friend with an oyster grant.

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But our life is not without its compensations. This evening, Kevin was making a soup out of the last of the Thanksgiving turkey while I took a much-needed shower. As I was rinsing the shampoo out of my hair, I heard him come into the bathroom. He moved the curtain aside and held out one perfect oyster.

Have you ever eaten an ice-cold, briny-sweet oyster in a warm, steamy shower? You should. You most certainly should.

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Kevin out musseling

Mussels are the gateway shellfish. If you’re a little intimidated by clamming or oystering because of the expertise, special equipment, and fortitude involved, then musseling is for you. You just wait for low tide and pick the things off the rocks. Literally. Then, when you’re bolstered by your mussel success, you can move on to more challenging shelffish.

Naturally, I did this in the wrong order. I tried clamming, which is hardest, first. This resulted in an ignominious episode involving wandering around on a beach known to be clamless, on a day when clamming was forbidden, using a clam rake to dig where clams wouldn’t have been anyway. But perhaps I was lucky. If I’d done mussels first, I might never have made it to clams at all.

We were tipped off by a friend that the Cape Cod Canal was jam-packed with mussels, and we went there at low tide yesterday morning, not knowing what we’d find. We brought a wide variety of implements, from a garden trowel to a pitchfork, because we weren’t sure what we’d need to harvest the catch – assuming we could find the catch. When we got there, we left all the implements in the car as we made a reconnaissance run to see if there actually were mussels to be harvested.

The canal is bordered by large, sloping, walls of rocks, the lower parts of which are covered with seaweed and algae that can make them quite slippery. Climbing down turned out to be the hardest part of the outing, and we were amply rewarded for it. Mussels, mussels, everywhere. We had about eight pounds of them inside ten minutes. No implements were required; we picked up big clumps of them in our hands. It was as though the mussel truck had dumped them there, just for us.  (Here’s what we did with them.)

The haul

Maybe it’s because I’ve spent my entire adult life in cities, but I haven’t yet gotten over my astonishment at being able to go to the right place at the right time and pluck dinner out of the water, or the woods, or the earth. Yesterday, I was astonished all over again at the canal, at low tide.

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