Suddenly, Steamers

Oh, I love these little guys. They're the perfect summer lunch. Simple to prepare, light in the stomach and delicious. It had been a while since I made a meal of them but snacking on little-necks at Greenwood Lake over the weekend was a welcome reminder to do so. The Asian markets near my house in little Chinatown offer fresh hardshells at 4.15/lb and I went in for the full pound. I also got a buttload of produce, noodles and various dried comestibles. Then I walked home, scrubbed the sand from the clams, put them in a deep pot with about an inch of water and let everything heat up while I changed out of my bathing suit. (Yes, I live across from the Sunset Park community pool; the frequently congested with obese teens who I am scared will make fun of me and once did but still fully swimmable and most critically FREE and ACROSS THE STREET and FREE community pool). I assembled few other ingredients because steamer clams season their own broth and man is it tasty. If you can hang, Joy of Cooking even endorses it as a beverage. I can't. The clams take 6-10 minutes to cook. Just keep looking at them and wait for their shells to fall open. Then you season the broth minimally with salt and black pepper. Then you dribble some melted butter over the top. Squeeze a lemon into it if that's what squeezes your lemon. Then eat them. You can use a little mollusk fork or whatever to pull out the goods, but I'm into using my hands. Scoop up some broth in the shell, sip it out and then go in for the kill. It's good. Afterwards, you can use the empty shells as castanets.

Giant artichokes with handmade linguine and steamed clams

Artichokes and steamed clams, especially littlenecks, are two of my favorite late spring/early summer foods. I find giant artichokes to be meatier than the regular sized variety.

The first thing I did was de-choke and trim the choke. All that means is getting rid of all of the things that will prick your fingers or the inside of your mouth when you're trying to eat the thing, like the spines at the tips of the leaves and the little needley things on the inside.

















I braised the halves with some basil, salt, lemon, and a couple of dried porcini mushrooms so that the liquid would be all delicious and usable in the rest of the elements of the dish. When the artichokes were halfway done, I stole some of the braising liquid for the pasta dough instead of just using straight-up water. I usually like to do a combination of semolina and all-purpose (unbleached or whole wheat) flour for the dough.


The pasta dough gets rolled out nice and thin and then rolled up, sliced, unrolled, and laid out to dry. You need to be careful to flour the surface of the rolled out dough well enough so that unrolling it isn't too difficult. When the strands get a little dry they get tossed into salted, oiled up, boiling water.

Last step! Scrub the shit out of those clams so no sand in the teeth. I got some white wine, olive oil, a little reserved braising liquid, and a couple of crunched down garlic cloves going in a lidded pan and tossed the clams in. Let those suckers steam until they pop open, making sure to agitate here and there to help them along the way. Then I plated up with a little clam broth poured over the pasta and clams and served the artichoke with some home-made aioli for dipping.