Or, more correctly, flattening my ab. One of my wife's co-workers called yesterday to say that he was on his way back from a diving expedition, had an extra abalone, and that he'd drop it by if we wanted it. We didn't hesitate to say yes, of course, and he pulled up around 5:00 with a nice-sized specimen. Or at least it looked pretty nice to me, being that I'd never seen one up close and personal. Meaning that I had no idea of what to do with the thing. Andrew very nicely loaned me a large metal implement that's used to pry the animal out of its shell, gave me a quick tutorial on cleaning, and then headed home with the rest of his catch.
A couple of glasses of Chinon and several perusals of websites later, I was ready to go. I took the big metal prybar, slid it in under the mollusk, and pried away. Didn't take long to separate the beast from the shell and when it dropped out, the guts (praise the Lord) stayed with the shell. I was then able to trim them directly into a garbage bag and save the shell for my daughter. That left me with a large slimy slippery and surprisingly hard blob of abalone. It was rimmed in goopy black flesh which I was told is edible but not pleasantly so. The surface of the foot was a brownish-orange color, and that surface layer is also not supposed to be something you want to eat. So I commenced to trimming off the black and brown stuff, periodically picking the whole thing up off the floor or out of the sink when it slipped out of my hands and off the cutting board.
After much trimming (and much wasted precious abalone, no doubt), I was ready to slice and pound. I'd read that you could take the whole thing, cover it in a towel, and beat the crap out of it with a two-by-four to soften it up. That sounded like fun, but I decided to reserve that treatment for politicians and I instead cut it into slices of about 1/4" each. These were pounded with a hammer that is supposed to be used for crushing ice. Once flattened, they went into a bath of lime juice and then the fridge.
Today, I took that slices out of the fridge and rinsed them in cold water. They've been cut into pieces around 1/2" square and put in a bowl with chopped tomato, cucumber, bell pepper, onion, jalapeno, etc. It's quite tasty with tortilla chips. The ab has a really nice, clean flavor and it marries well with the rest of the ingredients.
I have to say, though, that this is one of those food items for which you wonder how anyone ever came up with a prep procedure. It's a heck of a lot of work to get a bowl of ceviche. I imagine that I'd get much better at this if I had a consistent supply of abalone, but still! I'm not complaining, though. The ceviche is excellent.