Seafood Splurge

On my last day in Nice, Gerry and I had a seafood splurge. We went to the market and brought loads of seafood, most of which I had never tried. We set up the table on the baloney.
We started with sea urchins. I never even knew you could eat sea urchins. We started with herbal tea.

Table set with our sea urchins

Inside a sea urchin

 Sea urchins are very difficult to eat. You need to cut them open at the beak which means holding them on the spikes! And they are purple. There isn't much to them. The orange stuff is the only stuff you can really eat. The black/green stuff is not nice! Though the liquid is good when you dunk bread in it.
The next course was sea snails. We had two different types. And a very nice white wine called Pouilly Fume from the Loire valley.

The big sea snails

The little sea snails (purple!)

Enjoying snails and wine

The big ones were nice though I preferred the slightly smaller ones as they were less chewy. The little ones were nice. They really were purple. In the Roman empire, they used to grind them up and use them for purple dye. As you need a lot to make enough dye to dye a robe, this was only for the really rich, so the deep purple became a sign of the rich and influential. But we only had a few so ate them instead! :-)

We also had a violet. This is a really odd creature which looks like a vegetable but it is a oyster without a shell. If you hit it, it goes hard because it is a huge muscle. They only grow in the Med. It was very nice, though once again, not the easiest thing to get in to. 

a violet.

Finally we finished the seafood courses with a spider crab. They had longer thinner legs than a normal crab. 

spider crab

Waving goodbye to the crab as it valiantly gave his life!

The crab was very tasty.

Dessert was a 2 course deal again. We had some cheeses for the first part and some little pastries from my favourite bakery. The cheeses were good, especially the goats cheese with cranberries.

Our cheese table

Pastry mouse!

It was a good way to spend my last day in Nice. And very French! I will miss France, especially the food and wine and the sun. But it is good to be home. :-)