Here are two AWESOME books I recently read:
"The Worst Hard Times," Timothy Egan. Dust Bowl poverty, depression, dust storms that kill people and stir up so much static electricity they kill all Melt White's watermelons. I can't say enough about the gruesomeness of this book.
"Restless" William Boyd. Woman gets involved in WWII spying for Brits. Her daughter has a lame parallel narrative in the 70s. In the end, it's a good book and a real gripping read.
reading now: "An Oral History of World War Z," Max Brooks. It's kind of an interesting take on global crisis management, as told through a fictional war on zombies. Awfully geeky, but that's me. Seriously, delete the word "zombie" and you have a very interesting, very entertaining book.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Been a long time since I rapped at ya
Hey there. Long time no blog. It's harder to do when you don't have your own internet connection and and you do have an actual life. Seriously. And it isn't like my inner life is so compelling that I have to share any of it. Actually it's pretty boring. I'll tell you, I spent a lot of mental energy on a really ridiculous thing about a month ago — frozen rasperries.
Y'all who are readers of this blog know that I have a thing for Frosted Mini-Wheats, and that the ONLY way to properly eat them is with berries and the ONLY berry that 1) stands up to the defrosting process without becoming a bad mushy and 2) perfectly complements the sweetness of the FMW crust with utterly sublime tartness is the raspberry. Frozen, to me, tastes better than fresh. Probably because I have gotten used to it. And the best frozen berry brand is the Safeway organics raspberry, which is a lot more expensive than the Grocery Outlet (a.k.a. Desperation Outlet) berries or the Top Food berries (which are local and I'd prefer to buy, but the lazy teens and riff raff employed in the PNW do NOT get rid of the bad berries, they put them in the sack. The Chilean people who pick the Safeway Organic berries — and I hate the idea of eating Chilean produce that's been petrochemicaled in 6,000 miles — are decent people who, in the tons of raspberries I have eaten from them, have maybe overlooked two bad berries. Now that is a track record. Chile, you should be proud of your berry pickers. Someday I will travel to your berry farms and kiss all your berry pickers.)
Where was I?
Oh, so the Safeway berries are more expensive, and they don't go on special all that often, so when they did in December I loaded up. They were $5 a bag and I bought $70 worth in a week. I saved about $6, which is a little more than one other bag. I think this is the Wayne White in me. I tell myself this whenever I make a somewhat silly purchase that has some logic to it. Anyway, I did this because I wanted to stock up for the next time it wasn't on special. Silly me, the week after that special ended another special kicked in that will last till the end of March. Anyway, this is the sort of goofy stuff I think about and obsess about when I'm not doing other things like:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wageslavery/1801963011/
Clam digging! (Sorry, but if you're using someone else's Flickr account you can't just cut and paste the img src. And I'm not going to go through the rigamarole of downloading and uploading the photo)
To clam dig, my landlocked and citified friends, you really need a few things: A clam gun (a PVC tube with handles and a little airhole on top) and a stick. It is NICE to have waders, and it is REALLY NICE to have neoprene chest waders (like Ray's dad Ray lent to me). They are warm, and you can only clam in the winter. Also you need a mesh bag or cut up milk gallon jug or Costco-size bucket that once had laundry detergent in it (the mesh bag is the easiest, I would assume, but the old-timers often are out there in jeans and boots up to their hips in surf (cold, cold, cold surf) with their milk jug of clams and they're using an old-timey shovel (like a garden shovel but the shovel bit got bent 80 degrees or so) to dig. I'm kind of a yuppie clammer, if there is such a thing, considering how "Harbor" the activity is.
What you do is you go out an hour or two before low tide (usually right before sunset, when the moon and sun are kind of opposite) on a clam weekend on an approved beach (in the photo, it's Long Beach, but since November Ray and I usually go to Twin Harbors, which is only about 15-20 mi from Aberdeen). You take your sick (it helps if it has a square end) and you pop the end into the sand and if there is a clam nearby it will "show," which means it will go, "oh, crap! Something wants to eat me!" and start digging (these razor clams can go a foot a minute). When it digs it throws up a little bubble or dimple on the surface that is quite distinct. Sometimes you'll pound one spot and you'll see one show, and like some sort of sign has gone out to the clam community, another clam will start to dig, and then you'll have two clams to catch (why it's good to work in tandem with a partner).
Anyhow, if the clams had just stayed mum you wouldn't have known they were there at all. But they moved, so you put your PVC tube over the dimple, with a little bit more pipe over towards the seaside (clams favor digging seaward) and you shove that pipe down as far as it will go, and you twist and twist and get it at least 2/3 of the way down and you hope like crazy those sounds you hear are starfish in the way and you're not crunching the clams and making them hard to clean. Then you put your finger over the airhole and through the magic of suction and using your legs, remove the pipe from the ground, dump it out (or filter it through your fingers if a wave is coming in) and voila, chances are there's a clam there. Repeat as many times as it takes to get 15 clams (a limit, and if it seems small, you are used to those fried clam strips. Razor clams are really big.)
Then there is the joy of cleaning the clams. Ray's dad Ray was all too happy to do this for us in November, but since, I have had to cowgirl up and massacre the clams. I was a wuss to start, but that first clam didn't help none. He crapped sand as I picked him up, and boy did he wiggle. As it turned out, this was the last clam I'd ever touch that had the poop-fear reflex, so he probably didn't have any idea what was going on. Actually, I don't think I've ever seen a clam brain anywhere, and I've gutted a lot of clams, so I dunno. They filter feed, he was filtering.
So Ray and I share the burden now. He cuts the clams out of their shells (harder to do when you've crunched the shells) and I take the writhing bodies and start cutting them up. First you snip off the "neck," which is the part with the dark, barnacle-y thing on it. Then you cut up the middle of the "seam," which is obvious when you see it, and through both valves of the neck (bivalves, natch). Then you cut out the guts and detach the "digger," which is also where the anus is. Then you cut through the digger/anus area to lay it flat. There is copious rinsing at every stage, by the way. And once you get to the clam butt you scrape all the dark poop out of it.
Here's something wacky -- the butt? It's the BEST part! The digger is so much more tender than the neck it is insane. I love to eat clam tuchus! So, just because it's butt, doesn't mean it will taste like butt. But make sure you scrape it pretty good all the same.
By the time Ray and I finish cleaning the clams it's usually at least 7 p.m. or so. So often we don't bother to "prep" them for cooking. As per Kathy Quigg's suggestion, we take the clams and dredge them through flour, then egg, then cracker crumbs (Ritz is good for baking, saltines for frying) and lay them out on sheets to freeze. Once they are frozen stiff they can be bagged and fried straight out of the bag. And fried is really the only way to eat them besides chowder or baked, which calls for the same preparation but in a 500 degree oven for a few minutes (cuts down on the grease).
So clamming takes up a lot of my off-hours mental energy.
I must seem like kind of a dipstick if these are things that preoccupy me, but I do, in fact, worry about the state of the world, how long it is till spring, if I can do the whole Sunday NYT crossword puzzle and when I'll get my window fixed from the big winter storm. Also, back when granddad died there was a fair bit of mental energy in the whole grief thing. So I'm not this food-crazed person.
Also taking up the occasional amount of mental energy: "Heroes" hate. I don't watch it, but I hear there's a character who has the ability to copy any action she sees. That was totally a power I dreamed up when I was a kid and have been holding it in reserve for a character when I became a famous YA writer. Now I look like the big copycat. But here's the thing — I thought about it in relation to ice skating, and I think the chick on the TV is watching action movies. Not like I didn't think of that, but the character I had in mind was really devious in a way. Also about to be used and abused by some shadow government.
So, maybe I'll try keeping you all updated more often than once a year? It's not a NY resolution or anything, so don't hold your breath.
Y'all who are readers of this blog know that I have a thing for Frosted Mini-Wheats, and that the ONLY way to properly eat them is with berries and the ONLY berry that 1) stands up to the defrosting process without becoming a bad mushy and 2) perfectly complements the sweetness of the FMW crust with utterly sublime tartness is the raspberry. Frozen, to me, tastes better than fresh. Probably because I have gotten used to it. And the best frozen berry brand is the Safeway organics raspberry, which is a lot more expensive than the Grocery Outlet (a.k.a. Desperation Outlet) berries or the Top Food berries (which are local and I'd prefer to buy, but the lazy teens and riff raff employed in the PNW do NOT get rid of the bad berries, they put them in the sack. The Chilean people who pick the Safeway Organic berries — and I hate the idea of eating Chilean produce that's been petrochemicaled in 6,000 miles — are decent people who, in the tons of raspberries I have eaten from them, have maybe overlooked two bad berries. Now that is a track record. Chile, you should be proud of your berry pickers. Someday I will travel to your berry farms and kiss all your berry pickers.)
Where was I?
Oh, so the Safeway berries are more expensive, and they don't go on special all that often, so when they did in December I loaded up. They were $5 a bag and I bought $70 worth in a week. I saved about $6, which is a little more than one other bag. I think this is the Wayne White in me. I tell myself this whenever I make a somewhat silly purchase that has some logic to it. Anyway, I did this because I wanted to stock up for the next time it wasn't on special. Silly me, the week after that special ended another special kicked in that will last till the end of March. Anyway, this is the sort of goofy stuff I think about and obsess about when I'm not doing other things like:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wageslavery/1801963011/
Clam digging! (Sorry, but if you're using someone else's Flickr account you can't just cut and paste the img src. And I'm not going to go through the rigamarole of downloading and uploading the photo)
To clam dig, my landlocked and citified friends, you really need a few things: A clam gun (a PVC tube with handles and a little airhole on top) and a stick. It is NICE to have waders, and it is REALLY NICE to have neoprene chest waders (like Ray's dad Ray lent to me). They are warm, and you can only clam in the winter. Also you need a mesh bag or cut up milk gallon jug or Costco-size bucket that once had laundry detergent in it (the mesh bag is the easiest, I would assume, but the old-timers often are out there in jeans and boots up to their hips in surf (cold, cold, cold surf) with their milk jug of clams and they're using an old-timey shovel (like a garden shovel but the shovel bit got bent 80 degrees or so) to dig. I'm kind of a yuppie clammer, if there is such a thing, considering how "Harbor" the activity is.
What you do is you go out an hour or two before low tide (usually right before sunset, when the moon and sun are kind of opposite) on a clam weekend on an approved beach (in the photo, it's Long Beach, but since November Ray and I usually go to Twin Harbors, which is only about 15-20 mi from Aberdeen). You take your sick (it helps if it has a square end) and you pop the end into the sand and if there is a clam nearby it will "show," which means it will go, "oh, crap! Something wants to eat me!" and start digging (these razor clams can go a foot a minute). When it digs it throws up a little bubble or dimple on the surface that is quite distinct. Sometimes you'll pound one spot and you'll see one show, and like some sort of sign has gone out to the clam community, another clam will start to dig, and then you'll have two clams to catch (why it's good to work in tandem with a partner).
Anyhow, if the clams had just stayed mum you wouldn't have known they were there at all. But they moved, so you put your PVC tube over the dimple, with a little bit more pipe over towards the seaside (clams favor digging seaward) and you shove that pipe down as far as it will go, and you twist and twist and get it at least 2/3 of the way down and you hope like crazy those sounds you hear are starfish in the way and you're not crunching the clams and making them hard to clean. Then you put your finger over the airhole and through the magic of suction and using your legs, remove the pipe from the ground, dump it out (or filter it through your fingers if a wave is coming in) and voila, chances are there's a clam there. Repeat as many times as it takes to get 15 clams (a limit, and if it seems small, you are used to those fried clam strips. Razor clams are really big.)
Then there is the joy of cleaning the clams. Ray's dad Ray was all too happy to do this for us in November, but since, I have had to cowgirl up and massacre the clams. I was a wuss to start, but that first clam didn't help none. He crapped sand as I picked him up, and boy did he wiggle. As it turned out, this was the last clam I'd ever touch that had the poop-fear reflex, so he probably didn't have any idea what was going on. Actually, I don't think I've ever seen a clam brain anywhere, and I've gutted a lot of clams, so I dunno. They filter feed, he was filtering.
So Ray and I share the burden now. He cuts the clams out of their shells (harder to do when you've crunched the shells) and I take the writhing bodies and start cutting them up. First you snip off the "neck," which is the part with the dark, barnacle-y thing on it. Then you cut up the middle of the "seam," which is obvious when you see it, and through both valves of the neck (bivalves, natch). Then you cut out the guts and detach the "digger," which is also where the anus is. Then you cut through the digger/anus area to lay it flat. There is copious rinsing at every stage, by the way. And once you get to the clam butt you scrape all the dark poop out of it.
Here's something wacky -- the butt? It's the BEST part! The digger is so much more tender than the neck it is insane. I love to eat clam tuchus! So, just because it's butt, doesn't mean it will taste like butt. But make sure you scrape it pretty good all the same.
By the time Ray and I finish cleaning the clams it's usually at least 7 p.m. or so. So often we don't bother to "prep" them for cooking. As per Kathy Quigg's suggestion, we take the clams and dredge them through flour, then egg, then cracker crumbs (Ritz is good for baking, saltines for frying) and lay them out on sheets to freeze. Once they are frozen stiff they can be bagged and fried straight out of the bag. And fried is really the only way to eat them besides chowder or baked, which calls for the same preparation but in a 500 degree oven for a few minutes (cuts down on the grease).
So clamming takes up a lot of my off-hours mental energy.
I must seem like kind of a dipstick if these are things that preoccupy me, but I do, in fact, worry about the state of the world, how long it is till spring, if I can do the whole Sunday NYT crossword puzzle and when I'll get my window fixed from the big winter storm. Also, back when granddad died there was a fair bit of mental energy in the whole grief thing. So I'm not this food-crazed person.
Also taking up the occasional amount of mental energy: "Heroes" hate. I don't watch it, but I hear there's a character who has the ability to copy any action she sees. That was totally a power I dreamed up when I was a kid and have been holding it in reserve for a character when I became a famous YA writer. Now I look like the big copycat. But here's the thing — I thought about it in relation to ice skating, and I think the chick on the TV is watching action movies. Not like I didn't think of that, but the character I had in mind was really devious in a way. Also about to be used and abused by some shadow government.
So, maybe I'll try keeping you all updated more often than once a year? It's not a NY resolution or anything, so don't hold your breath.
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