I had a huge mess of clams that didn't go into the chowder I'd made for Friday's office luncheon, so I decided, given how big and beautiful they were, that they'd work great as fried clams. I also elected to fry up some hush puppies as a side.
The series of pics below will take you through a clam's anatomy and give you an idea of why I was suspicious of what initially appeared to be grit inside the clam's main body. Whatever it was, it turned out not to wash away, so I concluded that, even though it looked like grit, it was actually part of the clam's body.
Those pics:
Above, you see the clams and hush puppies, plus some homemade cocktail sauce and homemade tartar sauce. To be honest, I ended up liking the hush puppies a lot more than I liked the clams, whose funky taste proved to be more appropriate for a Korean jjigae than for fried clams. Too bad. All that effort and expense gone to waste. I'm wondering if there's a way to recycle the clams into a po' boy sandwich or something...
I was going to leave this comment in the chowder post, but I forgot. Anyway, that "grit" is just the guts of the clam. You totally should have thrown the clams into the chowder--that's what they're for!
ReplyDeleteWell... too late now. Chowder's gone, gone, gone.
ReplyDeleteThere's always next time, right? Although we are kind of already past chowder season now.
ReplyDeleteYes, I had originally wanted to serve the chowder during the winter, but going from mac and cheese to chowder might have been too much for some arteries, even with a one-month break between those meals. Anyway, next month, I'll be doing pulled-pork sliders. I also designated May as "pretentious food month," so we'll see whether anyone brings in deconstructed budae-jjigae.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, the boss told me, after this latest meal, that we need to start inviting the other departments that work on our floor. "That means I gotta cook more stuff," I said, to which the boss merely grunted. He thinks it may be bad form to have a shindig while in a glassed-in room where everyone can see us eating good food. His solution is to invite the three departments that work with us to our monthly meals, on a rotating basis, one department at a time.
While I'm happy to cook for a crowd, I'm probably gonna need some kind of reimbursement: these meals already set me back a couple hundred thousand won. I do them out of the goodness of my heart, and because I like to cook, and because I don't have any domestic commitments in the form of a wife and kids... but cooking for twelve or fourteen people will ramp my expenses up to a new level.