As much fun as clam digging is, the cleaning part isn't. (I know, I know, that's horrendous English.) Amongst us, we had ninety clams. It took a little over an hour to dig them and two and a half hours to clean and pack them. Thank goodness we had Larry Smith to teach us the easiest method. He set up a pot of boiling water and several buckets and bowls of ice water. The bags of clams were dunked in the boiling water for 10 seconds and then plunged into the ice water. This caused the shells to open and the clams to be easily plucked from the shells.
Then Larry had the fun job of teaching us how to clean the clams without mangling them beyond recognition. Poor Larry repeated the instructions over and over and I still manged to make a mess.
Everyone got in the act. From left to right, we have Fred, Doug, Carol, Jay and Linda. This Linda was taking the picture. It was cold, windy and drizzly, but we had a great time laughing at ourselves and each other. Such a nice group.
After two hours of dunking and cleaning, we dried the clam steaks on towels and then packaged them. However, we saved out enough for a dinner get-together.
Larry set up a sealing section in the basement of Jay & Linda's Alpine coach and sealed individual packages for each of us to take home.
We met again in the evening for a potluck dinner. The guys cooked the clams outside on the propane burners and we had salad, corn on the cob, macaroni & cheese, garlic bread and clams. It was all delicious! After visiting a little while, we piled into two cars and headed back to the beach. Low tide was about 9:30, so we hit the beach around 7:30 and within an hour, dug another 90 clams. That means another clam cleaning session in the morning.!
No comments:
Post a Comment