Killing Sea Urchins and Eating Uni for the First Time!

We decided to take a break from crabbing this week but we'd still like some seafood to eat, so we decided to drive all the way to Fisherman's Wharf in Richmond. This is only the second time that we've been there, but we've always heard that they have really good deals on whole sockeye salmon and sole. We were so happy last time when we walked away with 3 lbs of (frozen) spotted prawns for $20 and 6 live lemons soles for $10, lol. The prices were just ridiculously cheap compared to what we usually have to pay at T & T Supermarket for lemon soles.

Today, as we descended down the walkway to get to the market, Mr. Lilasaur's attention was immediately grabbed by a crowd near the end of the walkway. He "Oooooh"ed as he gravitated towards that direction, and dragged me with him. Turns out it was a stall/ship/vendor that was selling live sea urchins at 3 for $10, and a Caucasian woman was asking what they are. The vendor (Caucasian) was laughing as he said, "Well, they're sea urchins, and this is where you get uni from. You eat it raw. White people don't like this stuff!" The lady laughed and walked away. I started to inquire about how to open the the sea urchins and he briefly described to me. During our short conversation (about 3 minutes), 2 ladies have already bought their $10 worth of sea urchins.

By this point, Mr. Lilasaur was really pumped up and said "LET'S BUY THEM!" I have my doubts about this because my mom bought sea urchins before and stirred-fried them with eggs... and most of it ended up in the trash. I told Mr. Lilasaur about this and said, "Are you sure you're gonna eat them...?"  ಠ_ಠ "Yeah!!" "Alright then... Gimme the money." And that was that. We also found a vendor that sold Sablefish/Blackcod, so we also bought a 4-5 lb fish for about $48. I love this fish because it's just so smoooooth.

Anyway, the first place we turned to after getting home was obviously... Youtube. Found this really useful video:

This was the largest sea urchin we had, complete with my right hand and a crappy scale, hahaha:

My hand was hovering above the sea urchin, so in reality it was maybe even 16cm in diameter. So we followed the method that was shown in the video. This was the exciting extraction process:

I am usually the designated crab killer, but since sea urchins don't struggle like crabs do, Mr. Lilasaur was more than willing to take the matter in his own hands and said "Lemme do it!" like a man. That's why the pretty hands depicted above are his. Following the same method, we managed to get this much uni out of 3 sea urchins:

This is a standard-sized Corelle plate measuring about 10 inches across. I tried a little bit of it without anything... REALLY not my cup of tea, but I generally hate squishy stuff. Mr. Lilasaur, on the other hand, is fine with it. So Mr. Lilasaur looked online for a simple recipe which consists of putting the uni on a piece of bread along with a little bit of lemon juice, salt, and olive oil. It was easier to swallow but I still didn't like it. So I also tried to make an omelette with it... also tasted terrible. Therefore what ended up happening was that Mr. Lilasaur ate whatever he could and we gave the rest away...