Clam and kale soup

Not a post--I put my recipes where I can find them later

Low tide at 4:55. Sunset at 4:44.

The dreary December dusk descended with a breeze stiff enough to make my rake handle vibrate when held across the wind. The water-warmed wind wrapped around me like a September squall.

Foam broke off the back bay waves and skipped onto the mudflat, fleeting beach demons dissolving in the darkening gloom.

I got my dozen, then put three back. I had what I needed.

Back home kale waited for me.

• Two handfuls of fresh dug clams
• Three fistfuls of fresh cut kale
• A few sprigs of rosemary cut off the bush
• A small onion
• Just enough olive oil
• Big dab of butter
• A glass (or two) of white wine
• A cup of half and half cream

Prep the clams: 

• Scrub the clams.
• Bring clam pot water (about 3/4" deep) to boiling
• Put clams in until opened.
• Scoop out the clams, chop up the meat, save the juice, and hold in bowl until all clams cooked.
• Once all clams cooked, dump chopped clams and juice back into the clam water and let simmer.

Everything else:

• Pour just enough olive oil into iron skillet to coat bottom.
• Toss in a few sprigs of fresh rosemary and cook until leaves flatten in oil, then remove the sprigs
• Toss in chopped onion, and let simmer until onions start to sweeten just so
• Pour in wine, and let simmer for 5 minutes
• Rip up kale and toss into above in several handfuls--each handful should shrink into manageable size before tossing in the next.
• Toss in dab of butter, simmer until melted

Put it together:

• Pour the kale broth into the clam broth
• Simmer a few minutes, long enough so that the kale and clams get acquainted
• Toss in cup of half and half, turn off flame, and let set for 5 minutes.

Serve with bread and Guinness.

Clamming, teaching, and flow

Got a mess of clams from the flats today while feeding a few green head flies. Seems a reasonable trade-off.

I've been borrowing my nephew's clam rake--mine needs a quick fillet weld to tighten a pair of rogue tines--and I've been fighting the new rake. It's blades are both sharper and thinner, but the handle much less sturdy. The rake weighs about half what my rake weighs.

I keep worrying that the handle will snap as I drag the tines through the muck, yet I still pushed down on the handle until near its breaking point.

After paddling out to the flat this morning and getting just a few clams after a lot of work, my back tightened. Not good any time, even less good when you're out alone.I figured I may as well get whatever clams I could anyway, and worry about the trip back once I loaded my bucket, but I had to change the way I worked.

Instead of fighting the rake, I let the rake glide over the flat, not because of some newfound wisdom, but because of  cranky erector spinae muscles. *clink*! A clam.

*clink* another and
*clink* another and
*clink* *clink* *clink*

Teaching is a lot like clamming (or skating or writing or anything that needs flow)--when you try too hard to dig for what matters, you're going to get weary in a hurry with just a few morsels of reward.

I forget this regularly.

Mitigating environmentalism: On quahogs and horseshoe crabs

My clam bed, our clam bed, has been severely damaged in the name of environmentalism. "Wetland mitigation" resembles The Inquisition--noble purpose, squiggly means, and disastrous consequences.

The quahogs left after Evergreen Environmental  "removed a portion of the old rail bed and restored 7 acres to marsh" are stressed. I'm stressed. The folks at Evergreen Environmental get blessed by the government to "improve" a patch of the planet that had just about recovered from the last time humans intervened.

I still managed to scrape up enough quahogs for a fine June meal, then wandered over to the bay to watch the sunset.

Dusk, June 22, Delaware  [credit: Leslie Doyle]

The water was high, and still rising under the Full Strawberry Moon--and along its edge, the annual orgy of horseshoe crabs, their shells glistening under the shared light of the setting sun and the rising moon. In this dreamy June twilight, anything is possible.

I had been worried about my horseshoe crab critters--Sandy had walloped us pretty good--but the writhing critters enjoying the June dusk reminded me there's a reason they have been around since before the rise and fall of the dinosaurs.

They will survive us, too.

Apropos nothing...a clam chowder recipe

This one is for me, and may end up buried with other posts forever in the draft stage, but I put it together, I liked it, and I want to repeat it again someday soon.

Base:

Rake up a few dozen clams, steam them open before the next low tide, chop them up, toss back into the broth, then freeze.

Iron skillet:

Cut off a few sprigs of rosemary from the eternally flowering rosemary bush. (This bush is the very definition of optimism.)

Heat up decent or better olive oil, then toss the sprigs in the skillet. (Every time I taste a good olive oil, I think of Palestine--if ever a flavor matched the history of its peoples....)

Let the sprigs cook until just before charred (yeah, I know, but you do this long enough, and you will know, too). Remove the sprigs.

Toss in a half bottle of chardonnay--doesn't need to be fantastic, the clams are the show after all, but it can't suck, either. I'm not an oenophile, but I'm not so educated that I can't tell what I like.

Once warmed up, chunk in 1 or 2 minced onions, a chopped up whole celery plant, a carrot or two, and (maybe) one or two cloves of garlic. (I'm usually a garlic fetishist, so not sure why I hesitate here, but I do.)

Tonight I tossed in a minced jalapeno as well--not sure I needed it, but it was sitting on the counter (for Yahweh knows only reasons), so I used it.

Cook down until just before the celery gives up the ghost, then let sit. (I added basil somewhere along the way, but forget when. Basil is as forgiving as the Lord Himself, so no worries.)

Big brew pot:

Chunk up a couple of potatoes, and bathe in clam broth. Simmer until the potatoes are a couple of minutes from just so.

Um, that's it.

Putting it all together:

Dump the skillet goodness onto the potatoes. Toss in the clam meat. Let it simmer for 2 or 3 minutes, and you're done.

This is one reason (among many) I clam.

A science teacher's challenge

 "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions."
Thoughts on Rachel's Challenge.

Atoms, as most adults know them, do not exist. Never have. Our models are human constructs, useful but little more than organized patterns of neurons firing away, as we try to make sense of the world around us.

Yet most reasonable adults in these parts will tell you that they know what an atom is.

Quahogs, on the other hand, are as real as these hands upon this keyboard. Beautifully curved mollusks that live with as much purpose as most of us, tucked away in mud flats just a few miles away. Good eating, too.

Yet most reasonable adults in these parts could not find one with a GPS mounted on a bull rake.


Which matters more?


The abstract matters, of course. Without it, language dissolves and bridges fall. Still, the point of language is to share our collective grasp of the world around us.

 We worship our words, our images, more than the ground we literally walk on, the dirt that keeps us fed.

***

Today our lambs got exposed to a cacophony of sound and images--Chuck Norris and bullets and Sean Hannity and smiling babies and Hitler and  white coffins and Anne Frank and moving anthems and stories of coincidences that defy logic all to send a simple message: be kind.

The show was designed to rip at the amygdala, an organ already pretty charged up in the adolescent crowd. I don't like seeing truth and children manipulated, even if (or maybe especially if) the message is kindness.

The models of science ultimately rest on our understanding of the ground beneath our feet. As abstract as science can get, it's ruled by what can perceive of the physical world. Science requires evidence, and it requires open discussion of how that evidence can be fairly interpreted.

Maybe I just don't like Chuck Norris.

I'm a science teacher. I worried a bit about my students accepting the stories told today at face value simply because their emotions were twanging like Duane Eddy's guitar.

I needn't have worried. My students have been mostly kind this year. I kept quiet as I listened to their conversations.They're adding a healthy skepticism to their kindness.

The kids are all right.

Oh, and a suggestion--if you spend an hour telling the kids how everyone matters as much as everyone else, don't end it by announcing a "select" few will get together later to start a club.

Chuck Norris photo from Amazon.

Clamming in November

The shadows are long, now, even at noon. We know why, of course, and pretend otherwise, living under electric lights, listening to electric voices, staring at electric screens.

The wind is blowing over 20 knots from the northwest, in November, and the tidal flats call like Sirens. No one out there but me, a gull, a few scoters, and the clams.

I teach in an urban district, where the few guns around tend to be snubby, designed to be used at close range on humans. I spend most of my free moments in Cape May, where guns are more prevalent, tend to be longer, and more often used on game other than H. sapiens.

I hunt with a rake and a hook, not quite bloodless, and unlikely to raise my testosterone cred, but it does connect me with this life business more than the folks who never kill their prey.

I'd rather be a wolf than a vulture, no matter how fancy the store. We have a lot to learn from the hunters.

***

Even vegetarians kill. Plants are every bit as alive as you and me. We place high regard on sentience, and no one has yet shown that plants give a damn about anything, but every living animal must take lives in order to stay living.

Tonight we munched on quahogs and Brussels sprout sprouts. The clams are dead, the Brussels still alive, so a vegetarian could claim some moral superiority.

Even so, the clams tasted pretty good.

***

I put three back, the largest I caught. Each was a couple of decades old, each had done nothing to earn the wrath of my rake.

They are sitting within a few inches of each other, their collective age older than mine, and I hope they spawn.

Their fellow quahogs are in my belly now.

And so it goes.....

Photo taken along Richadson Sound by us.

Blowout tide

We got a 22 knot breeze blowing out of the true NNW.
We got a full moon, with tides predicted to be 1.2 feet lower than normal even before we got the breeze.
We got ourselves a blowout tide, baby!

And we got a bunch of clams to show for it. In February. Just when all the nonsense gets to be a bit much, grace intercedes.

We got blown about around a bit today, my Uncle Bob and me, but we got clams to show for it.

 (If anyone reading this is down the Jersey shore, get yourselves out there--if you don't want quahogs, scallops are there for the picking.)

The photo is of some of the clams raked today. Clams in February. Life is good.