A peck of clams, just harvested

As a food, clams are a bit inscrutable. The flesh is locked up tight between two shells and, once released either by shucking or by cooking, reveals a mysterious anatomy unlike that of the birds and mammals we cooks are used to.

There are some go-to recipes for clams, like chowder and clam sauce and stuffed clams, but I think clams’ culinary utility extends farther. The discovery I’ve made about them is that, if you handle them right, you get a neutral, albeit salty, protein that can go almost anywhere.

While “co-hog” might sound like what Kevin and I do to the dessert, it’s also the pronunciation of “quahog,” the hardshell clam native to our area. Quahogs go by other names, depending on size. The smallest ones are littlenecks, followed by top neck, cherrystone, and chowder.

I don’t believe there are any hard-and-fast size delineations, but a littleneck is about two inches across, top neck a little bigger, cherrystone up to three inches, and chowder bigger than that. How’s that for definitive?

A clamming expedition generally yields a mix of sizes, and we usually eat littlenecks and top necks raw, and cook the rest. And, because I have vast clam experience, I’m going to break out of my pattern of blathering about what we do here and actually talk about something useful, like turning clams into a neutral, salty, cheap, healthful, all-purpose protein.

And, although it is a cruel twist of fate that consigns a singularly unskilled photographer with woefully inadequate equipment to the task of photographing the least attractive of all edible creatures, I’m going to include pictures.

It’ll be fun.

You start with a bunch of quahogs. Ideally, they’re cherrystone-size and above. Since each clam requires a bit of work, and the big ones don’t taste appreciably different from the small ones, big ones are ideal. Less work, same product. But use what you have.

If they’re dirty, give them a rinse. There’s no need to get them sparkling clean, but you’ll probably be cooking with the liquid you steam them in, and you don’t want it dirtied by a lot of sea schmutz.

Next, steam them. Put them in a pot, but don’t fill it all the way to the top; the clams need some room to open. Put just a little bit of liquid in the pot. Just a little bit. Just enough so you have an eighth of an inch or so in the bottom of the pot. As the clams open, they release liquid, so you need just enough to get them started. If you start with too much liquid, your clam juice will be too dilute.

Which liquid? I’m glad you asked. Water is clearly traditional, and if you use it, you will end up with a nice bit of traditional clam juice at the bottom of your pot. But, depending on your application, you might want to try something different. If you’re doing a clam sauce or chowder, vermouth is great (and is required for my clam sauce recipe). Red or white wine, if you have it around and it’s not expensive, works like a charm. If you’re going to make a chili-style concoction (and clam and chipotle combine beautifully), steam them in a little beer.  Think outside the faucet.

Cover the pot, and put it over high heat until you start to see traces of steam leaking out under the lid. Then turn the heat down, or you’ll end up with clam juice bubbling out and making a mess. But don’t open the pot. You need the steam to build up in there and, as they say in the barbecue world, if you’re looking, you ain’t cooking.

When you suspect the clams have opened, that’s when you open the pot. It’s probably somewhere between five and ten minutes. You may hear them rustling around in there as the shells pop open, and that’s a good clue.

If some of the clams have opened but some haven’t, take out the opened ones with tongs, and put the top back on to keep steaming the rest. If, after a couple of iterations, you have one or two stubborn hold-outs, don’t throw them away – yet. Turn the heat off, and just leave the clams in the hot pot with the lid on. Chances are good that, after a while, they’ll give it up. Just give ‘em time.

Any clam that doesn’t open goes in the garbage. It was dead to begin with, and you don’t want to eat it.

Once the clams are cool enough to handle, pull them out of their shells. If one or both of the adductor muscles (those chewy round cylinders) come with it when you pull the clam body out, that’s fine. If they stay behind, attached to the shells, just leave them. It’s not worth the effort to get them out.

And now the fun begins. First, you want to separate your clams into two parts. There’s a section that’s the belly and foot, and it’s surrounded by a bunch of other stuff, including the adductor muscles (if they came out), the mantle, and various mysterious innards. There are two reasons to separate one from the other.  The first is that, if there’s any grit in your clams, it will usually be caught in between these two parts, and if you rinse as you separate, you will de-grit very effectively.  The second reason is that, if you decide you want some larger pieces of clam in your dish, you’ll want to cut those pieces from the belly-and-foot part.  (All this will make sense once you read the rest of the directions)

So, pull off the outer part with the mantle and mysterious innards – it comes off easily — from all your clams, and you’ll be left with two piles, one of belly-and-feet and one of everything else.

At this point, you have to decide whether to leave the bellies intact.  They contain the grayish-greenish stomach contents, which aren’t disgusting or bad-tasting, but they will give your clams a greenish cast if you leave them in. I usually squeeze out the bulk of them, but leave some bits behind.

And now comes the crucial step in transforming clams into a  neutral, salty, cheap, healthful, all-purpose protein. The big secret? You chop them in little pieces. Really little pieces.

When people say they don’t like clams, it’s almost always the texture they’re objecting to. And, let’s face it, tenderness isn’t a virtue that falls to the lot of the clam. At best, they are toothsome. At worst, they give rubber bands a run for their money.

Which is why, once you have your de-bellied, rinsed clams all ready to go, you just throw them in the grinder, all the parts together. If you don’t have a grinder, you can do this by hand, but it’s a big enough job that you’ll probably end up with imperfectly chopped clams and carpal tunnel syndrome.

Get a grinder.

I use the one attached to my KitchenAid stand mixer, an appliance you will have to pry out of my cold dead hands. Well, one of my cold dead hands. The other will be holding the VitaMix.

That pile of ground clams is your neutral, salty, cheap, healthful, all-purpose protein. And, if you started with a peck, you’ll have about six cups of it.

You can make this process either easier or more difficult, depending on your application and inclination. If you simply took the clams out of the shells and tossed them in the grinder, you’d be fine. You might have a bit of sand and you’d definitely have all the stomach stuff, but spicy composed dishes hide a multitude of sins.

And, if you wanted a few bigger pieces of clam in your dish, you chop the bellies and feet (the more tender parts) by hand, and just put the remaining miscellanea through the grinder. After you’ve done this once or twice, you’ll get a sense for how persnickety you want to be, and whether you want bigger pieces in your dish.

Below are links to some of the clam recipes I’ve developed over the years (some of which were written before I saw the light, and call for chopped clams), but there are a zillion other things you can do with them. Once you have ground clams, the world’s your oyster.

Perfect White Sauce
Clam and Andouille Stew
Clams Fra Diavolo
Goan Clams

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Dutch babies Alasdair and Sophie. Photo by Mary Blair Petiet.

Sure, I knew about literal Dutch babies. Our friends Niels and Mary Petiet have two of them, named Sophie and Alasdair. They’re not babies anymore; they have grown into the two most photogenic children on the planet. But that other kind of Dutch Baby, the spawn of a Yorkshire pudding and a pancake, was unknown to me until Paula posted about it on her blog, Weeding for Godot.

I saw the picture of Paula’s beautiful and tempting Dutch Baby, noted the simplicity of the recipe, and filed it away in my mental to-be-attempted recipe file. Where it languished, unattempted, for over a year.

Lately, though, I’ve been rifling through that file and attempting some of those recipes. Specifically, the ones that involve eggs. I don’t quite know what possessed us to build up a flock of fifteen chickens for our two-person household, but we are now in the position of trying to find uses for the four or five dozen eggs we’re getting every week.

As luck would have it, Stephanie Stiavetti, of The Culinary Life, who is an excellent cook and a charming person, did a Dutch Baby guest post on Simply Recipes just the other day. Hers is a little different from Paula’s, but it is equally beautiful and tempting.

It was time.

I used Stephanie’s recipe, with only two changes. She calls for a cast-iron pan, which I don’t have, so I used an All-Clad copper skillet, which has the twin advantages of not holding heat as well and costing ten times as much. I also added blueberries to the batter.

Imperfect, but tasty

One or the other of those changes, or perhaps both, prevented my Dutch Baby from puffing up in the middle the way it should, and it wasn’t nearly as beautiful as Stephanie’s, Paula’s, or Niels and Mary’s. But it was crunchy around the crust, fruity in the middle, and eggy throughout. We loved it.

And, if we eat three a day, every day, we’ll use up every single one of our eggs!

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Dave, thanks for running “Dream Catcher” through your anagram software – that’s exactly the kind of thing we like to do around here. And to all of you who played along at home painting out letters, we very much appreciate your getting into the spirit of the thing. Why I didn’t see “ream her” I’ll never know! (Kingsley, this is exactly the kind of thing we count on you for.)

We loved some of the boat names you told us about, like “Lagniappe” (from Sarah) and “Damnit Bob” (from Barbara Christensen, who should know that she shares my maternal grandmother’s maiden name). Accidental Mick, we liked “Oh Good Another Expense” almost as much as we liked “Iota.” And, even though it wasn’t a boat name, we also liked “Mop Chop Shop” as a hair salon (from Sonja Kahler – and thanks for the kind words).

Chiggerbritches, I hope you do start your band, the Loose Stools, although we decided that, as a boat name, that wouldn’t pass the Coast Guard Test.

Bill, you made us want to buy a crane just so we could call it “Barnstable Hoister.”

What surprised me, though, is how well you all seem to know us. While I know, because I have statistics reports, that a lot of people come visit and read my endless posts about our life here, this is the first time I’ve gotten a sense that I’m actually connected to you, connecting with you. So many of the names were tailored to us – our personalities, our history, our past adventures (Judy even referenced a post from over two years ago). I particularly liked it that people who had never commented before came out into the light (you know who you are, Shea).

I know this is inexcusably corny, but the whole comment stream made me feel like we have friends, and it warmed my heart.

So it is with much chagrin that I tell you that, although we have a contest winner, we don’t yet have a name. We liked a lot of the candidates, and a couple of you cast votes for “Loafs and Fishes,” which gave us more confidence in our initial idea.

Here’s the thing. If you give your cat a name and then it doesn’t suit, you can just change it (to Cat, naturally). But, with a boat, once you take off (or paint over, or whatever you do) the old letters and pay good money to a skilled artisan to emblazon your new name across the hull, you’re pretty much stuck with it. So you have to go in with confidence, and that’s something we don’t yet have. The search will continue.

Meanwhile, though, we’re sending sea salt to Yvette, who came through with a great list. Forty names! All relevant! Several, including “Diabolical,” “Slippery Slope,” and “Object Lesson,” were high on our list. So, Yvette, please send your details to me by email (tamar@starvingofftheland.com), and we’ll get that in the mail for you. If, down the road, we use one of the suggested names, we will certainly also send salt to the suggester.

Thanks to all who contributed. We had great fun checking the suggestions every day, and I’m sorry we remain unable to make up our mind. But, when it comes right down to it, what’s in a name?

Wait. Don’t answer that.

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Friday, February 17:  The last day for names!  Tomorrow, I’ll pick the winner.

Kevin and I don’t have a good track record in the naming department. Our late, lamented cat was named Cat. Most of our chickens don’t have names, and the ones that do named themselves. Our alpha male turkey was Drumstick.

We never got around to naming our first fishing boat, the now-for-sale Eastern, although we referred to it colloquially as the “Ahoy Polloi.” A good name, but stolen from Caddyshack.

Our new boat came with a name: “Dream Catcher.” Which is a perfectly fine name, but it doesn’t quite suit us. Dreams are not what we’re out to catch.

My first thought was to see if I could think of something on the Green Peace model. No, not that Greenpeace, the Green Peace that was a Manhattan storefront bodega on Fifth Avenue somewhere in the twenties, I think. I used to go by it on the bus, and wonder just what happened at the meeting where they decided to call it “Green Peace.”

A while back – could be ten years, could be fifteen – it changed hands. The new owners clearly didn’t think much of the name either. They renamed it, but they were evidently operating on a shoestring budget, so they changed the name to “Green Pea” and painted some stripes over the C and the E on the big green awning over their storefront.

I thought this was genius. They get a groovy new name and an excellent used awning in one fell swoop.  They must have prospered, because the old “Green Pea///” awning disappeared a few years later, replaced by a much classier one with no striped-over letters.

I thought I might be able to try a similar approach with Dream Catcher, whose name is written on the side of the boat in big letters.  Unfortunately, the best I could come up with is “am cat,” but Kevin and I aren’t morning people and “am cat” would be a crappy name for a boat even if we were.

Back to the drawing board.

Boats are second only to hair salons in their ability to induce their owners to give them silly names with puns. You’d think, having had my hair cut at Shear Glamour my entire childhood, I would have learned a lesson about that, but my fondness for puns clearly trumped my aversion to silly names as Kevin and I tossed out suggestions.

The thing about naming a boat, though, is that there are a few things you have to take into consideration. The reason we never actually named the Eastern the “Ahoy Polloi” was that our friend Linda warned us that we should imagine using the name to call the Coast Guard in an emergency.

It’s also important not to display hubris, so “Nuclear Fishin’ ” was out. Kevin, being a trader, has a soft spot for
“Margin Call,” but you don’t want a name you have to explain. Not everybody knows what it’s like to be “on Margin Call.”

So far, the best we’ve come up with is “Loafs and Fishes,” but I find I’d like to give the boat a name with a little more dignity and, besides, I’m not sure that passes the Coast Guard test.

This is where you come in. Suggest a name. Or two, or seventeen. If we use it, we’ll send you a beautiful jar of our very own hand-made sea salt.

In a way, this is a contest for me, too, because Kevin thinks I won’t be able to bring myself to use a name that we don’t think of ourselves. I’d like to think he’s wrong about that, so please send in names. Lots of names. Good names, bad names, funny names, serious names.

Just do it quick. Kevin has started to call the boat “Dream Catcher,” and I want to nip this thing in the bud.

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When Kevin and I first moved here, in spring of 2008, we thought it might be fun to try clamming, and after one or two ignominious failures (which you can read about in all their ignominious details in my favorite local publication, Edible Cape Cod), we managed to go out one day and dig up our dinner. It was astonishing to me that I could go out in the water at low tide, dig through the sand with a rake, and unearth something good to eat.

By the beginning of 2009, I’d become so taken with the idea of first-hand food that I started trying to eat at least one food every day that we’d hunted, gathered, fished, or grown, and I launched Starving to chronicle the effort.

Kevin and I still call that our Winter of Shellfish. We didn’t yet have chickens or hoophouse, and we didn’t go into that winter with stores of frozen fish, turkey, and tomatoes. We had clams. And oysters. And clams again. And again.

Since then, we’ve branched out, and lately I’ve done almost none of the kind of clamming that got me into this in the first place. We’ve eaten plenty of clams, but we’ve gotten them off our oyster grant, which has a patch left over from a clam-farming effort.

For the past month, though, we haven’t had to go out to the grant much, so, if I wanted clams I had to get them the old-fashioned way.

And I did want clams. Our friend Amanda is stopping by on her way to Ireland, and that’s a visit with white clam sauce written all over it.

This morning, it was nineteen degrees, with a stiff breeze out of the north. Low tide was at 9:00, so I didn’t have the luxury of waiting for it to warm up. I layered up, got my waders and clamming license, and headed out to the beach at the end of Bay Street, in Osterville.

It was cold enough to keep the crowds away, and I was the only one out there. I walked up the beach to where I knew clams used to be, and waded in. After trying three or four spots, I found them.

Clamming is hard work; it’s like digging. You work your rake deep into the sand, and then pull it through, hoping to feel the smooth shell of a clam. When you find one, you work the tines behind and under it, and pull it up. After about ten minutes of this, I was almost completely warm – the fingertips of my right hand were the only hold-outs. After thirty minutes, I had a peck of clams.

Since we started all this, I’ve wondered how long it would take for it to get stale. There’s no question that novelty is part of the appeal of everything we do, and if it’s most of the appeal … well, we should start apartment hunting in New York pretty soon.

But being out by myself, knee deep in North Bay, raking dinner up out of the sand, didn’t feel stale at all. It felt fresh and constructive, and I still marvel that there are so many things to eat in the water. It’s not quite the same as that very first clam, but it’s still got a long way to go before it gets to stale. Even as the novelty has begun to wear off, the satisfaction has been abiding, and satisfaction and clam sauce go a long way

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Believe me, I’ve tried, but I can’t hide an agenda to save my life. In fact, the only thing I do worse than hiding my own agenda is uncovering someone else’s. I take absolutely everything at face value, something my mother has been known to twit me about. “Concrete-bound,” she calls me.

Until about ten years ago, I used to say that I was the most straightforward person ever to walk the earth. And then I met Kevin, who makes me look like Henry James.

One of the reasons my husband and I live in peace and harmony is that we leave nothing interpersonal to chance. If he wants me to know something, he knows he has to tell me. In English. Body language and pointed hints will not get the job done. And this suits him just fine, as it is his first impulse, when he wants me to know something, to tell me. In English.

Kevin is a relentless and compulsive truth-teller, and tackles every situation head-on. Although he has a much more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of the workings of other people’s minds than I do, he calls ‘em as he sees ‘em. There isn’t much of a filter between what he thinks and what he says, which means you almost always know what he’s thinking – a wonderful thing for a woman who can’t uncover an agenda to save her life.

And you always know where he’s been. He’s fundamentally incapable of not telling me what he did while I was away.

And, while I’m away, he’s always up to something.

Last week I left him alone for an afternoon and evening, and came home to find him sprawled on the bed, with what looked like closing credits scrolling up the TV screen. “Hi honey,” he said. “I had a steak and watched a war movie.”

So you did.

“And you know what else?” he asked, a glint in his eye.

Alarm bells went off. Leaving Kevin home alone with power tools, not to mention a big hairy truck with 650 foot-pounds of torque, is not always wise.

He led me into the living room and picked up something that looked like a cross between a fishing pole and an electrical conduit. He could barely suppress his pride. “It’s a sabiki rod!”

A sabiki rod!

A sabiki hook

A sabiki rod, for those of you have never jigged for mackerel, is a rod specifically designed for a sabiki rig, which is one of the most diabolical of all fishing lures. It’s a length of line, five feet or so, with five or six teeny hooks spaced along it, each attached to the main line with a length of line about four inches long and decorated with a little feather.

To use the rig, you attach a weight to the end of it and drop it down to the sea floor. Then you reel it up to the depth you think the school of mackerel is. Then you jig it, jerking it up and letting it sink again, until you get a fish.

If your sabiki rig is in a school of mackerel, you will get a fish, or several fish, immediately. A mackerel cannot resist a sabiki rig, and it’s not unusual to pull the rig up with a fish on every hook.

But that is not why the sabiki rig is diabolical. The sabiki rig’s diabolical nature is evident only when it comes time to put it away. It is impossible to store a sabiki rig without tangling it hopelessly, and every fisherman has spent the better part of a full-length movie untangling sabiki rigs in preparation for the next day’s fishing expedition.

If there’s one job Kevin hates, it’s untangling a sabiki rig, so he set his mind to building a rod that would obviate the need for it. The internet has all kinds of suggestions, and he amalgamated a number of them into his own design.  As is his wont.

The Zebco set-up

It started with a Zebco 404 reel, which is the kind of reel kids use – you press a button to release the line and cast. It costs about $13., and comes spooled with 15-pound test. The Zebco then got attached with a hose clamp to a five-foot length of PVC, and Kevin drilled a hole through the PVC a few inches above the reel. The line gets threaded through the PVC pipe and attached to the sabiki rig. At the end of the rig is a weight with a hook that’s big enough to not fit through the PVC.

So, when you reel in the line, the sabiki rig gets housed in the length of the PVC, and the weight on the end keeps it taut by hooking over the end of the pipe. Then a little pipe insulation on the reel end for grip, and a cap on the end of the PVC so the edge doesn’t abrade the line, and Bob’s your uncle.

Total cost? “Seventeen dollars!” said Kevin, “So I made two!”

Kevin's sabiki rod

Yes, while I was out my enterprising husband made two sabiki rods. I should go out more often, I figured. So, yesterday, I went up to Boston to interview a source for an article and have dinner with my friend Dianne. I came home quite late, but Kevin was still up. I put down my bag and was about to take my coat off when he stopped me.

“You wanna come see what I did?” he asked, flashlight in hand.

The same alarm bells went off. No matter how many constructive things Kevin gets done while I’m out, the alarm bells will always go off.

He led me outside, around to the side of the house that faces the pond. He shone the light on a hole in the ground. And then a second hole. And a third. All the holes were where stumps used to be.

“You pulled the stumps!” I said.

“It was awesome!”

Now, stump-pulling, under ordinary circumstances is hard, frustrating, sweaty work. It is most definitely not awesome. Which led me to believe we were not dealing with ordinary circumstances here.

“I’m afraid to ask how you did it …” I said.

“Well,” he began, “I backed the truck up by the side of the house.”

That would be the big hairy truck with the 650 foot-pounds of torque. I knew that truck was trouble. But I didn’t think he’d try to use a truck on the side of the house to pull a stump in the back of the house. I groaned.

He told me how it went down. He tied a rope around the stump, and then ran it around a tree down by the water, and up to the truck. Just because it’s worth picturing, I have worked up a crude graphical representation.

The house is our house. The red rectangle represents the big hairy truck (the other two vehicles are actual, less hairy, vehicles). The red X is the stump, and the white line is the rope.

He put the truck in its lowest four-wheel drive gear, and started to creep forward. The rope stretched. He crept some more, it stretched some more. And then, as he crept, the rope released and made that boing-oing-oing noise you hear in cartoons.

At first he thought the rope had snapped, but then he realized it had pulled the stump out with such force that it flew all the way out into the pond. He had to go down and haul it in.

It was so much fun that he pulled two others. The only reason he stopped was that he ran out of stumps.

“It was awesome!”

I am glad to be married to the kind of man who uses his time alone creatively and constructively. And if, some day, that means he burns down the house or totals the truck or severs a limb, I take comfort in the fact that I’ll be the first to know.

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This winter, though, this winter is different. It’s the first week in February, and the ground isn’t frozen. We’ve had exactly one snowstorm, and the foot of snow melted in 48 hours. Temperatures have been in the forties most days, and occasionally in the fifties. The only body of water that has iced over is the puddle on the low spot in our driveway.

Each day that is warmer than normal seems like a gift, a gift that takes us one day closer to our goal of an ice-free winter.

Even if I weren’t an oyster farmer, the prospect of an ice-free winter would make me happy. But the thirty thousand or so oysters we still have in cages out in Barnstable Harbor give an ice-free winter a whole new meaning.

Most oyster farmers take all their stock and equipment in over the winter because ice destroys everything its path. You can leave nice neat rows of cages out in December and come out to heap of twisted wire in March. We took in our seed (oysters we got as pinheads last spring) just around New Year’s, and the 100,000 one-inch oysters will remain safely stowed in a giant refrigerator until, probably, April. But we still had a good number of this year’s crop that didn’t quite make it to three inches, the size at which we can legally sell them. At this very moment, Kevin and I may own more 2 7/8-inch oysters than anyone on the planet.

We’ve been ready to take them in for a couple months now. We’ve planned to put them in big plastic boxes called fish totes, that hold about 800 oysters each, and store them in our basement, which stays cold but doesn’t freeze. It’s not an ideal way to store them, and we would expect a good portion of them to die, so we didn’t want to take them off the water until we had to.

And so we watched the ten-day weather forecast, waiting for temperatures to drop low enough to freeze the water in the harbor. As long as there was no ice, there was no need to bring in the oysters.

All December, there was no ice and no prospect of ice. And again in January. And now it’s the first week in February, and the ten-day forecast shows more of the same. It’s beginning to look like we’re going to have an ice-free winter, which, with luck, our almost-legal oysters will spend not dying in Barnstable Harbor.

So far, so good. We went to check them yesterday, and found them happy and healthy. Some of them even showed signs of growth, in the form of a translucent white ring around the edge of the shell. Growth! In February!

I’m sure a freakishly warm winter will have unfortunate repercussions. A little later in the year, we may have wall-to-wall insects, an unpredictable growing season, or mutant raccoons the size of mastiffs. At this point, though, I’m ready to pay almost any price. One more month, please. One more month.

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But, before I give you January’s list, I have a confession. At the end of last year, when I added up our total 2011 take and figured out it was about 11% of our calories, I thought it would make all of you hunters, gatherers, fishermen, and gardeners curious about your own year in food. I thought I’d get comments along the lines of, “What a great way to look at first-hand food, Tamar! I added up our year and it was 47%!” Because my commentariat is uniformly polite and supportive, no one would add, “Ha ha!”

Only Milkweed & Teasel’s Jen, who, I am convinced, is my across-the-pond doppelganger, thought this exercise was even remotely interesting. In a hail-Mary effort to get people other than Jen interested, I even posted the tally on the Huffington Post. Let’s just say there’s no bandwagon forming.

So I have a question: Don’t you want to know? After all the work you do growing tomatoes and keeping chickens and raising livestock and tracking deer and hunting mushrooms and digging clams, don’t you want to know?

It’s not hard to work up a rough estimate of your take. We’re not looking for precision here. You eyeball your pile of potatoes and figure it’s twenty pounds. You take a guess of the average yield of your ducks. You count your chickens, and figure so many eggs per. Then you check the USDA’s calorie database and do the math.

Don’t you want to know?

Well, I want to know. And you’ll just have to bear with me as I do my little empirical exercise every month.

Saved by the eggs

For simplicity’s sake, I count everything we harvest – whether we eat it or not – but nothing we barter for. The point of the exercise is not to track what we eat but to see how well we’d do if we had to rely on what we hunt, gather, or grow.

It’s a good thing we don’t have to rely on it, though, because we’d be mighty sick of eggs.

Here’s January’s haul:

1.5 pounds beets (300 calories)
1 pound parsnips (300)
1 pound beet greens (100)
1 pound collard greens (100)
50 oysters (500)
1 peck of clams (about 4 cups of chopped clam meat, 800)
1 eider (a whole 10 ounces of duck meat, 300)
18 dozen eggs (about 800 calories per, for a whopping 14,400)

On the other side of the equation, I’m still estimating that we need 5000 calories per day (2200 for me, 2800 for Kevin), even though it may be a little high. It makes the calculating easier: about 150,000 calories needed per month.

In January, thanks to our chickens, we harvested a respectable 16,800 calories. Of course, we didn’t eat all those eggs – we gave a lot away – but if the alternative had been going hungry, we would have.

January came in at 11%. Even though our goal is 20%, I don’t expect January to get there. There’s no fishing, there’s almost no garden, and, although there is some hunting I’m a crappy hunter. February and March, and maybe even April, will probably be about the same as January – all eggs, all the time. Come May, though, we’ll start picking up.

So, don’t you want to know?

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A Fry Baby is the world’s smallest deep fryer, and we got ours at a Yankee swap hosted by our friends Tommy and Ali, for which all the guests were instructed to bring something that’s been lying around the house for ages but never used. We brought a platter we’d bought at a yard sale a few years back, but somehow never warmed up to. But one couple brought this 1970’s-era miniature deep-fryer. Imagine! They had it for years, and it was still in the box! There’s no accounting for taste.

A Fry Baby, with jam for scale

It’s not really called a Fry Baby, but Kevin started calling it that and the name stuck. It was made before we had all these pesky safety regulations, and there’s no visible means of controlling the temperature of the oil, and no automatic shut-down if you forget to unplug it. It’s clearly a house fire waiting to happen, and perhaps it’s the element of danger that endears that little appliance to Kevin, who’s been deep-frying anything that’s stopped moving.

If you have a Fry Baby and you have chickens, it won’t be long before you start wondering just what would happen if you tried to deep-fry an egg. You’ll go to the Internet, and you’ll see all kinds of videos of people trying to do it, with results that range from failure to tragedy. Than you’ll eventually stumble on one of Jacques Pepin doing it, with perfect results.

The lesson you should take from this is that you should only deep-fry an egg if you’re Jacques Pepin. The lesson we took from it is that, hey, we can deep-fry an egg!

Pepin does it in a shallow pan of oil, and uses two wooden spoons to gather up the white as it spreads. But, before he does, he gives the critical piece of information. Make sure, he warns, to refrigerate your eggs so the whites don’t spread so much.

Anyone who’s ever opened an egg just out of the nest box knows that, the fresher the egg, the more coherent the white. As eggs age, they ooze carbon dioxide and the whites lose their viscosity.

So, we figured, if a cold egg is good, a fresh cold egg is better. So we heated the oil and, when it was hot, we took a couple eggs right out of the 38-degree chicken coop.

I broke an egg into a bowl, and slid it into the hot oil. I had my two wooden spoons ready, but I didn’t need them. The bubbles that rose up around the egg had the effect of keeping the white close to the yolk. I flipped the egg over mid-fry, but it’s not really necessary. There’s enough oil on the top that it cooks pretty evenly. When the white began to brown, about 45 seconds in, I took it out with a slotted spoon and drained it on a paper towel.

It was perfect, with whites completely set and a liquid yolk. There was a little crispy edge on the whites, like you get with a pan-fried egg.

The sandwich was better than the picture

Kevin had found another way to do it, and we tried that, too. You soft-boil an egg, peel it, and then coat it with flour, then eggs, then breadcrumbs. Then into the oil for about thirty seconds. It works great, but I don’t think it’s worth the extra work. Kevin, who can’t resist a crispy panko crust, disagreed.  Which is fine by me, because it means he may occasionally make one for me.

We made open-face sandwiches of crusty bread, goat cheese and bacon, sautéed beet greens and garlic, and topped them with the eggs. They were terrific.

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We’re not there yet, and Kevin’s been unsatisfied with the pace of our progress. So he dispensed with the whole leapfrog thing and went ahead and bought a boat and a truck.

The boat is a Steigercraft 23 Chesapeake, with an enclosed pilothouse and a cuddy cabin. At least I think that’s what it has – I’m still a little iffy on the terminology. Better I show you a picture.

The hull is from 1990, and has a recently re-fiberglassed deck and a new gas tank. The engine is a 2008 225-horse Evinrude E-tec. It’s s super-low-emissions two-stroke, the big brother to the 50-horse version we have on our oyster boat.

The best part is that it’s totally tricked out. It’s got super-groovy Raymarine radar and GPS, and outriggers on the roof that are controlled from inside the pilothouse. It’s got enough rod holders for a small village and – get this – autopilot.

I was a little worried about the autopilot when Kevin explained what it could do for us. “We can go out to Horseshoe Shoal and set it to go in circles over our favorite spot.” I immediately had visions of us, lazing in the sun, as our boat went on autocrash with another boat with the same favorite spot.

“Don’t worry,” Kevin said. “We also have collision avoidance.”

A 23-foot boat with a pilothouse and cabin is a lot more boat than our current 19-foot center console. It’s the biggest boat Kevin was comfortable trailering regularly, and he’s only comfortable trailering it with a big hairy truck. So he flew to Chicago, made a deal on a 2008 Ford F250 Super Duty diesel, and drove it home.

While he was gone, our friend Bob stopped by. Bob knew all about the boat; he went to see it with us to because we wanted it to get the Bob Seal of Approval. I told him Kevin was away, driving home in the big hairy truck we bought to pull it.

Bob scratched his head and took a pointed look around our property, densely populated with boats and trucks. “I see a lot of addition,” he said, “but not very much subtraction.”

That hit the nail on the head. When Kevin got home, we had a come-to-Jesus on the issue of subtraction. At first, Kevin contended that I was overreacting to addition. “Hey, at least it’s not multiplication,” were, I believe, his exact words. I told him that if he didn’t focus on some subtraction, we might be headed for a long division.

So we officially have for sale one 19-foot Eastern center console with a 70-horse Johnson, a 14-foot Carolina Skiff with a 25-horse Honda four-stroke, and a 1970 Series IIA Land Rover. No reasonable offer refused, since we’ll never have room for the Queen Mary at this rate.

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