When attending University in Halifax I had an opportunity to consume an abundant amount of shellfish including crabs, lobsters, muscles and oysters. I’m a huge seafood fan!

I recall many lobster fests where we’d sit around a picnic table with a pile of chilled lobsters on newspaper and we’d simply sit, crack shells, eat and laugh. Those meals were one heck of a lot of fun.

On more formal nights out we’d go to The Five Fisherman in Halifax. They have an all you can eat muscle bar that comes with your meal. Now that was one of my favorites! Buckets of muscles followed by a nice shrimp dinner!

While there I never had occasion to eat any oysters. It was always muscles. Now that I’m married I can’t eat as much shellfish as I’d like since my wife has an alergy to it – a pretty bad one in fact. So when I was in Las Vegas before Christmas I had an opportunity to try Oysters Rockefeller at a really great steak house near our hotel! Now I happen to be hooked and I’m craving them all the time!

Now that I’m hooked on them I’ve been doing more research about the safety of eating raw oysters and discovered there are processes that can be applied to make it much safer – the most well known and most commonly used post harvest process is called IQF. IQF is a flash freezing process and the oysters are usually packed and served on the half shell and preserves the flavor as though they were fresh out of the water. You can find out more about this and other post harvest processes at Gulf oysters. Now that I know that I have no reservations what so ever and am looking for my next chance to order some!