Author: foodnerd

Apparently one must have a party of several dozen in order to hold a clambake on the beach; no one does it for small parties. A couple of places have big clambake pavilions where smaller groups can go and join in, but these do not appear to a) be on the beach or, more importantly, b) use seaweed in the cooking. Thus thwarted, Hedge and I turned to the DIY solution. She was going to Marblehead anyway to visit folks, so we called ahead to arrange for some rockweed, steamers and lobsters to be ready for pickup, and we cooked those suckers right here at home.

Rockweed is essential for the proper clambake flavor. I put a bunch in my roasting pan, put the clammies on top, and covered with more rockweed and a couple of cups of water. The pan fit nicely inside the gas grill with the grills removed, and 30 minutes later, gorgeous fresh salty steamers and littlenecks (steamers on the right in photo, with bigger shells & much messier bodies to eat, but most delicious, i think). The 6 of us put away 8 pounds of clams, along with 4.5 lobsters and a groaning board of side dishes. (The remaining 1.5 lobsters became lobster salad for this morning’s breakfast, along with bread fried in leftover lobstery butter and some of those tasty dill horseradish pickles. Mmm.)
We put some rockweed in the lobster boil as well, along with a tablespoon or so of kosher salt. Lacking enough burners and a big enough kettle, we nuked the corn and pan-boiled the potatoes the usual way rather than attempting to get them in there with the sea critters. Caramelized zucchini & onions w/ thyme, long beans w/ walnut oil and walnuts, garden tomato & mozzarella salad w/ wild arugula were all amazing; the garlicky slaw somehow didn’t go with the other flavors as well as i hoped it would, though it was tasty in and of itself.
Gooseberry-raspberry tart was yummy too, though well into my second piece I discovered that tangy tart filling mixed with vanilla ice cream makes a wonderful creamy treat on its own, sort of like a berry fool.
This was the first time hedge, littlelee, spleen & I all cooked together, and I must say it was a beautiful thing, a well-oiled machine of ad hoc cookery.

Tonight’s impromptu dinner party was a triumph of leftover usage. Half a log of goat cheese, half a jar of roasted red pepper, and 4 of the !@#$% zucchini went into the pasta. The bag of plums & pluots that I hadn’t had time for became the plum tart I’ve been meaning to make for a year. And the half-bag of multigrain pita chips and whole-wheat loaf-end were perfect with white bean dip. Yay, me. *giggle*
Notes: multigrain sesame pita chips from Trader Joe’s are delicious. And the bean dip ended up being white beans, chickpeas, rosemary (which gets stronger over time, note to self), parsley, garlic, lemon, hot sauce, salt, pepper, olive oil, and a bit of red wine vinegar. (It needed tanginess.) I love, LOVE my immersion blender.

What to do with that cup of onion juice? Use it to steam up a bag of baby carrots with salt & pepper, then stick the immersion blender in there and whiz them up with buttermilk. Mix in snipped dill, serve cold. Yum yum. Low fat, low maintenance, highly tasty. It would probably even go nicely as a first course with the kebab kubideh, though if you haven’t so generated onion juice you could probably just steam some onion in with the carrots.

Another armload of cucumbers this week, so in addition to the 4 jars of russian horseradish-dill pickles, I just made another big batch of pickles using my uncle’s special pickling-spice mix. They smell awesome. (His mix is mustard seeds, dill seeds, broken-up bay leaves, allspice, cloves, and hot peppers, from what I can tell.) So I’ve got pickles up the wazoo — good thing I really like pickles. Also palming a few off onto pickle-loving friends…

Continue reading “PickleFest 2004 (duuude)”

This week the market had none of the cuts of meat I wanted, so I bought what was on sale: a beef eye round roast. I wanted something fairly neutral in flavor, since I had a variety of leftovers that needed to go with it, so I got out the new edition of Joy of Cooking and tried their slow-roast recipe. Rub roast with olive oil, liberally salt & pepper, roast at 450 for 10 min then at 250 for 30 min per pound. My 2 pound roast was in for 1 hour 25 min all told, and it’s dreamy. Nice brown salty outsides, moist pinkish insides, very lean, nice for slicing (mmm, sammies — where’s my horseradish?). Blindingly easy, very yummy, probably good for dinner parties too.