snails snails everywhere

This year’s June has been weird. It’s been raining on and off for a while now. We haven’t gone more than a couple of days without rain, in fact, and some nights have been cold enough that I’m glad I ended up bringing a coat along for the summer. When the rain comes, so do the snails. For slow-moving creatures, they sure come out quickly. When the lawn is wet, there’s an inevitable crunch every so often. So Claudette, Sarah (the new stagiaire), and I went foraging for the little homemakers. They seem to like climbing on walls and around certain plants. We loaded up a special escargot basket (with a locking door, and mesh too small for them to crawl through) full of them and pondered our upcoming meal.

A couple of days later, Mami finally got around to cleaning the suckers (turns out you soak them in a water-based mixture of salt and vinegar, with some stinging nettle if you feel like going to the trouble), and boiled ‘em. I whipped up a nice aioli, and we got to eating (I eat the whole best, while Claudette likes to get rid of the guts). A couple days of this, and the idea (and the snails) grew old. Claudette made a little tomato-based stew with the rest of them, which we thankfully gave up on days later. Still, it’s nice to be up to date on my snail-handling skills.