Seafood Preparation Quotes

I began cutting up fish when I was a little kid.

I love big shrimp, like Japanese botan shrimp and the meaty ones from Santa Barbara, Calif. In classic Japanese cooking, shrimp like these would be dropped into a broth or boiled as served with sushi. But I think boiling dilutes their great flavor, and they are better when stir-fried.

My own favorite way to cook and eat razor clams is to simply dredge them in a mix of seasoned flour and cornmeal, then pan fry them in butter until crisp and golden. Be careful not to overcook them so they stay tender, not tough and chewy.

If you've got cockles, those nickel-size, heart-shaped mollusks, and you want to get fancy, steam them, then toss the meat in finely ground cornmeal.

To shuck oysters, you'll need an oyster knife, a handy tool with a sturdy handle and a short, rigid blade which you can pick up for about ten bucks in a kitchenware shop or fish market. A quick trip online will yield any number of videos and slide shows with step-by-step instructions on how to shuck an oyster.

One of the first jobs I ever had was opening clams in a seafood restaurant, so I'm pretty quick at it.

I prefer my oysters fried; that way I know my oysters died.

They say fish should swim thrice * * * first it should swim in the sea (do you mind me?) then it should swim in butter, and at last, sirrah, it should swim in good claret.

Most seafoods should be simply threatened with heat and then celebrated with joy.

I'm a big lover of fish. Cooking fish is so much more difficult than cooking protein meats, because there are no temperatures in the medium, rare, well done cooking a stunning sea bass or a scallop.

My longtime friend Steven Steinbock, who has worked with me for more than thirty years, is a master at panfrying fish and seafood.

Mobile is a seaport town, and we ate a lot of seafood. We'd go fishing, we'd catch our fish and we'd eat our fish. It was a ritual on Saturday morning for all my family - my grandfather, my brothers, my uncles, my father - to go fishing, and then the ladies of the family would clean the fish and fry them up.

The summer after college, I got a job as a chef at Conscience Point Inn in Southampton. I spent the summer on the water and cemented my expertise with seafood. I've always gravitated toward places that do seafood.

You read about these oyster-shucking contests: Somebody did 100 oysters in three minutes, three seconds. I'm lucky if I can open one in three minutes, three seconds.

There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.

When I started cooking the meal at home, after I had started cooking in restaurants, I usually would prepare bay scallops or lobster.

I'm a huge seafood lover; I could cook it everyday.

Fish butchering means a lot to me as a chef; I take pride in it and get a lot of joy from filleting fish, working with fish, breaking down fish, trying to understand fish.