This is July’s entry for The Royal Foodie Joust, from Jenn, The Leftover Queen.
Last month, Peter over at Kalofagas won the joust and selected the ingredients: Seafood, Cilantro, and Sesame in any form.
I could think of a few Latin seafood/cilantro recipes, or Asian seafood/sesame recipes, but the cilantro and sesame together made me scratch my head a bit. I definitely wanted to skip sesame as a garnish and wanted to use the taste, but sesame oil and cilantro can both be strong, assertive ingredients. I needed an assertive seafood to make a triad, I thought, or use a very little sauce.
Oysters popped into mind for both reasons. This will be a love-it-or-hate-it recipe, because in my experience, oysters on the half-shell have strong proponents and opponents. In fact, I only converted into the pro-oyster camp about a year and a half ago, now I can’t get enough of them.
A traditional garnish/sauce for oysters is the mignonette, a mix of wine vinegar, shallots, and cracked black pepper. I made a faux-mignonette using lime-juice as the acid, with sesame oil, shallots, salt, pepper, and cilantro. Just a drizzle of sauce, and yum:
