Scallops are startlingly mobile.
I don't much like clams, and have often felt like it's a personal failing, because my dad was always a huge fan of clam dishes.
If you mix up minced clams with cream cheese, you get dip.
I guess you just have to read the spaghetti box for that recipe.
Anyway, that looks pretty good, especially for a recipe where everything is shelf stable.
1: whoa. Who knew! It looks a little bit like a pair of wind-up goof dentures skittering away from you.
Because I care about our oceans, I usually eat spaghetti with meatballs.
But seriously, I should ask my mom how many cans of minced clams it took to make the dish, back in the 70s. Maybe 3?
Let's see. One of my cans are 1/3 cup clams and a touch over 1/2 cup juice. If it was 50-50, 4 cans would work out almost perfectly. So I bet the recipe was based on 3 cans of clams, and each can was 2/3 cup clams and maybe 1/3 cup juice? So you'd have to supplement for the other cup.
2: clam dip and french onion dip were my New Year's eve treats as a kid.
If you want to rank guilt-free seafood, I think mussels beats clams.
Meatballs are great for the environment because they are self-composting. I keep hearing how they roll right out the door and decompose under a bush.
Mussels are great. The place by me does them in butter/wine and it's like $25 for a pound (including fries).
It's such a 70s/80s thing (60s too?) that she felt the need to clarify you can't substitute margarine for butter.
Surely one would use more garlic now?
I always use as much garlic as I feel like using. And brown onions for twice as long as the recipe says.
People sometimes want to put oregano in pasta sauce. People are often wrong.
There's been two big boxes of margarine sitting in my fridge for a couple of years now that my vegan mother-in-law left behind and no-one else will touch. Probably its time to move 'em on.
People are allowed to put stuff in red sauces? I get tears if there are tomato chunks. Did you know that Ragu Old World Traditional has the least bells and whistles of any spaghetti sauce, and comes in a giant vat, and is the easiest meal if we have ten minutes on an extremely busy weeknight and everyone will be happy about it? Besides me and Jammies?
We use Paul Newman's Tomato Basil sauce for easy pasta. But if I make meatballs, I make my own sauce.
My grandma's recipe, which I can't find now, uses tomato paste. Lidia's recipe uses canned San Marzano tomatoes, which is a little better. I don't think my grandma could get anything but tomato paste.
Also we buy bulk quantities of frozen turkey meatballs. I don't know why, but many of us are totally cuckoo for cocopuffs over them. Like, just microwave up a bowl for a snack. Or make a quick meatball sub in a hot dog bun after school. Why not.
My mom used to make this with linguine
For my easy pasta sauce I cut open a bratworst and fry up the meat inside, then simmer it in red sauce for a bit.
Does anybody make pasta sauce this way? https://food52.com/recipes/13722-marcella-hazan-s-tomato-sauce-with-onion-butter
I haven't done it yet, but next time I make pasta sauce (sometime this week) I plan to. Wonder whether it's really the boom.
TL;DR tomatoes, an onion, and butter (though others say you can substitute olive oil). That's it.
I do, and it's lovely. needs cooking for a long time, as she says. Marcella Hazan is great.
Strange side note: We got hold of a copy of Constance Spry's 195x cookbook, a giant hardback that was a standard present for middle class brides. It's basically "How to cook like your mother did even when you haven't got her servants" (Spry also wrote eight or nine books on flower arranging, to set the background). I wanted it to look up my mother's recipe for kedgeree made with Tuna, which is inferior to the Elizabeth David version with smoked haddock in every way except that a voice inside me still screams that it's the proper kedgeree.
But the really weird thing was her recipe for bolognese sauce, made entirely with liver. I have no idea.
In general, it's a good book to study to realise how nightmarish English food used to be. Pasta is to be served in long dishes with the pasta (boiled for 20 minutes) piled up at one end, the sauce at the other, and the grated cheese in the middle.
I have my mother's copy of Spry (actually mostly written by Rosemary Hume). A great way to remind oneself of the basics. You have to remember that there were still shortages, even if most rationing had ended by the time it was published. I don't think Mum ever made spag bog with liver, although liver and onions was a staple.
I never heard of spaghetti with liver.
25. In wartime and post-war Britain you ate what you could get and did what you could with it.
Yeah. It was pretty much reversed for my family. War started and they had more money so they didn't need to eat only what they grew.
Liver and onions was definitely a thing for us. One day my mom realized no one liked it and the health claims were probably bullshit, so she stopped making it.
26: Also true in the US in the '60s when your parents have eight kids.
Yes. I should find out more about both Spry and Hume. A lost part of social history
Like clams through the pasta sauce, so are the bivalves of our lives.
30. Yes, Spry was mostly known as a florist. She did the arrangements for the Duke of Windsor's wedding among others. Wikipedia credits her and Hume with inventing Coronation Chicken, although I had understood that it was basically a retread of Jubilee Chicken from 1935. But they were quite something.
Heebie, I got yer North Florida content right here: the clamming industry in Cedar Key is where Jack Davis ends his environmental history of the Gulf of Mexico, the hopeful case of responsible environmental management to cheer you up after hundreds of pages of very much not that. (Which is not to say all clams are guilt-free, blah blah.)
I come for the bivalve jokes, but I STAY for the unsung heroes of North Florida!
Speaking of clam juice, I recall old men putting it in their beer. I guess because living through the depression was depressing.
That seems okay. Add tomato juice and hot sauce and you have a michelada.
When I was a kid we had a collection of weirdo 70s American cookbooks, which no one cooked from (it wasn't the kind of food we ate), but which I loved to read. My parents definitely did not buy them; I think they came with the house. One of them was a microwave oven cookbook, which touted the health and culinary benefits of microwave cooking. There was a whole section on microwave cakes -- apparently, a cake baked in a microwave has a lovely soft texture and consistent color, instead of the hard browned crust of a cake baked in a conventional oven. You could even bake a pie, although it was best to use the browning element (we didn't have that accessory). I was recently reminded of this because my brother was reminiscing about how his fifth grade teacher made the kids do book reports on "how to" books, and he chose this cookbook for his book report. He made cookies and brought them to class. They were as pale and tough as you would expect a cookie baked in a microwave would be, and also, he used a tablespoon of salt rather than a teaspoon. No one would eat them, except one kid, who loved them and who, my brother was disturbed to remember, ate them all.
I love that kind of thing. That's an instagram account right there, if you're ever bored.
40: I love that story. Whatever happened to the kid that loved the pale, tough, salty cookies?
That kid's name was Tom Holland. And now you know the rest of the story.
Hi Heebie - for your side note, I use https://www.seafoodwatch.org - I have it in app form, so it's on my phone when I'm shopping. It has clams in the Best & Good Categories, with just a few types (northern quahogs) where there's concern, but not an avoid rating.
I feel like the internet let me down because www.seefoodwatch.org doesn't bring up a close-up picture of somebody chewing food.
45: I think that's actually WikiFeed.
Re: guilt-free food. The clam industry and the renewable electricity industries are in a range war off the New Jersey coast. "In fact, the same ecosystem that makes fishing along the Jersey coast so lucrative, its flat sandy bottom, makes it ideal to construct a wind farm." So enjoy your claims with a side of fossil fuel! Althougb it seems that the clammers are losing, so clams will get more expensive as electricity gets renewable.
Fun article that explains pretty well how the clams are scraped from the bottom of the ocean these days.
https://whyy.org/articles/jersey-shores-fishing-industry-wonders-can-it-coexist-with-planned-massive-wind-farms/
Honestly, in a typical year, I probably spend more than twice as much on electricity as I do on clams.
They need to train up a team of tame walruses, which are adapted for getting shellfish out of awkward places.
New Jersey gets resentful when you refer to it that way.
Can't one farm clams? Seems like it would be worth trying.
It's just like farming salmon crossed with farming corn.
They sort of farm mussels and I suppose clams by anchoring buoys in shallow water with ropes attached. Then after a while they pull up the ropes covered in shellfish and pull them off.
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This is perhaps the purest iteration of "I never thought leopards would eat my face" yet. You, working for Trump, genuinely thought he would give a shit about you being abused?
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There is some shellfish farming on the edges of Chesapeke Bay and on small rivers in New England. The New Jersey shore is all beaches, casinos, container ports, or oil refineries, way too valuable for farming to work. I don't think anyone has figured out how to farm in mid-Ocean.
I like the idea of farming scallops: when they break out of their enclosure, the scallop wranglers must hunt them down, mounted of course on sea horses and armed with little tridents.
54: I was also struck by her ongoing lack of empathy. This isn't your typical "I hated gays until my son came out" kind of Republican story. Grisham is only interested in her victims because they will have an impact on how she is treated.
There will be an effort to destroy me -- I know because I did the same thing to others who saw the Trumps up close and came forward with books or interviews or op-eds to tell the truth.
New York likewise did a piece on her that is pretty sympathetic, but that sympathy is continually undercut by the fact that the story has too much Grisham in it. She really isn't able to process events in any manner except through their impact on her.
It's probably pretty useful to be that able to avoid any introspection.