Monday, April 16, 2018

seafood dinner (Sunday)

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...



4 comments:

Charles said...

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!

Kevin Kim said...

Well... too late now. Chowder's gone, gone, gone.

Charles said...

There's always next time, right? Although we are kind of already past chowder season now.

Kevin Kim said...

Yes, 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.

Meanwhile, 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.