Sunday, September 16, 2007

Clams, beautiful clams. Also mussels

The Cranky Old Geezer and I went clamming this morning. This is because he has received his free over-60 clamming license, which is good until he dies. He's going to have it laminated and I'm glad that he is feeling so optimistic.

Anyway, we went clamming. I use the word 'we' in the Royal sense. The only thing I did was hold the dog's lead and tell the COG what he was doing wrong. He paid no attention to me, of course. We had no idea what we were supposed to be doing and I'm afraid we crushed as many clams as we found. In the end, we threw them all back and got mussels instead.

Mussels are easy-- at low tide they litter the beach and you just pick them up. Now they are on my kitchen counter in a pan of brine with cornmeal in it. As pets, they aren't too interesting, so I imagine the COG will want to cook them after a while.

Even without clams it was lovely to be on the beach at low tide. It's sunny and cool and there's the smell of the sea an the cry of seagulls.

One day soon I will figure out how to put pictures up and you'll see how lovely it was.

2 comments:

Andrew Ryall Briggs said...

I tried clamming once - in the '80s on the Oregon coast. Something other worldly about the experience - it was dawn, lowest tide, and the shore covered by solitary clammers whacking the sand and watching for the tell-tail bubbles. I got one clam (dig dig dig. nothing. dig dig dig. Nothing... dig dig dig etc.) But in the end the one clam I did get wasn't big enough for a small bowl of soup, so I threw it back. I took some wonderful photographs ~ so memorable to me, and if we lived on the coast, I'd like to try again.

The Bride said...

I looked online for instructions about how to do it (clamming) and most of the instructions were from Oregon.