My obsessions with clams continues. I’ve been ordering them whenever I can find them on a restaurant menu, so I’m beginning to get a feel for the varieties available. My favorite are still those at Gino’s, primarily because they’re more soupy. Most clams come steamed and served in a sauce of some sort. But they’re mostly clams. The ones at Gino’s are served with far more liquid than others I’ve found. I like that.

This weekend I decided to finally learn to make clams on my own. We’re hosting our informal monthly “food club” next weekend (a club that includes me and Kris, Paul and Amy Jo, Mike and Rhonda); I’m hoping to make steamed clams. We’re supposed to only prepare new recipes for this gathering, but I’m leery of preparing clams for the group without having done so before. So I’m experimenting. Good thing, too.

On Friday I bought two pounds of “steamer clams” from Thriftway (cost: $11.50). I assumed that these were the sort I was getting in restaurants. Wrong. Steamer clams are big, much larger than the clams I get at Higgins or Gino’s. I didn’t realize this, though, until I fixed them Saturday morning.

I found a recipe from Caprial that sounded promising, and began to prepare it. I brought a cup of white wine and two teaspoons of butter to a boil, and then added the clams. When they opened, I was shocked to see how much meat was inside. The idea of eating this was gross, even to me. I changed tack, and set those clams (and the liquid) aside for some chowder.

Tiffany took us for a hike later in the morning. Afterward, we stopped at Costco where I was able to purchase a five pound bag of Manila clams for $17.50. Jerry, the seafood guy, gave me a recipe for preparing the clams (which was basically one I had come up with on my own: white wine and garlic), and guaranteed me that I would love these clams or I could bring back the empty bag and get a full refund. Nice guy, that Jerry.

At home, I tried a variation on the morning’s recipe. Someplace (I can’t remember where), I had clams with bacon, and quite liked it. So, I melted a little butter, added some bacon ends (I keep a stash of these in the freezer — I buy a bag at a time from Voget Meats in Hubbard), and fried the bacon til crispy. Then I added some minced garlic and minced shallots, frying these til fragrant and golden-brown. Next I added some white wine. When this was boiling, I added the clams.

The end-product was good, but I actually found the dry white wine too piquant. It was overbearing. Also, the clams are still larger than the ones I get in the restaurant. I think the restaurant clams are “littlenecks”. I’ll have to find a place to buy them.

I’ve offered to make clams for dinner tonight, and Kris has gamely agreed to eat them. I’m going to adapt my recipe a little. I have about four pounds of clams left, so I’m going to do the following:

• Melt a tablespoon of butter in our soup kettle.
• Add a handful of bacon ends, cooking them til crispy.
• Add several cloves of garlic and most of a shallot, minced, frying these til golden-brown.
• Add the rest of the bottle of pinot gris (about two cups?), bringing it to a boil.
• Add the clams. Cover them til they open. When they do, I’ll pull them from the kettle.
• Finally — and here’s where the recipe steers toward Jeremy’s — I’ll add a cup or two of fish stock. I’ll bring the mixture to a boil, reducing it some (though not too much &mdahs; I want a broth, not a stock).

I’d love to add saffron to this — the big restaurants do — but I don’t know the proper stage to add it. I’m also curious about hickory-smoke flavor. Not with this particular recipe, I guess, but in general I think a smokey flavor would go well with clams. I’ll have to experiment with that, too.

I’ve been on a clam kick lately. Over the course of a one-week period at the end of March and beginning of April, I had awesome clams three nights. Oh my. How come no one ever told me they were this good?

I’m going to ask for the recipe at Gino’s next time I go back — those are my favorite of the three I tried — but meanwhile I got Jeremy to try to remember his recipe (which was ad hoc to begin with). He basically made up the recipe as he went along, and then he and I tried to reconstruct it over the phone two weeks later. There are bound to be errors, but it’s a good basis from which to work.

Jeremy’s Clams
In a large pot, brown 6-8 oz. of hearty, spicy sausage (he used soppresatta) in a couple tablespoons of fat (he prefers olive oil, but thinks butter would work). Add 3 shallots (or, he said, 1-1/2 cups onions) until they begin to caramelize, then add 5-6 cloves of garlic. Don’t let the garlic burn. When things are browned nicely, add about 1-1/2 cups white wine. Boil to reduce by half. At 1/2 cup of clam juice, 4 cups fish stock, a can of tomatoes, and some a pinch of hot pepper flakes. Bring to a boil. Add 2-1/2 pounds of clams and cook until they open. Distribute clams evenly to serving bowls. Reduce liquid. Add some fresh ground pepper and 2-3 tablespoons butter. Ladle sauce over clams. Serve with garlic crostini.

I did some googling to try to find a a recipe similar to the one at Gino’s. Their dish is more “soupy” than Jeremy’s sauce. It’s a garlic/saffron thing with clams and mussels, served in a dish of broth. (It comes with bread, too.) It’s heavenly.

All I came up with was clams in garlic and wine, which is actually closer to Jeremy’s concoction.

I’m angling for more clam opportunities in the next few weeks. We’ll be dining out with a web acquaintance, with a group of Portland bloggers, with the MNF group, and then probably with Andrew and Courtney. I’ll be hoping for clams every time.

I’m obsessed.

From the kitchen of Mike and Wendy Pringle comes this top-secret recipe for Chet, a seasoned salt of which I’ve become quite a fan. Wendy slipped me a note card with the ingredients when she arrived at Ham Feast the other night. And here, for the first time, I’m making this secret recipe public.

To produce Chet in your own home, combine the following: 26oz salt, 1-1/2 oz ground black pepper, 2oz ground red pepper, 1oz garlic powder, 1oz chili powder. Optionally, add 1oz of MSG.

yum

What can you use Chet for? What can’t you use Chet for? Use it for burgers and salads and soups and scrambled eggs and grilled fish and fresh-sliced apple. Use it for anything where you want a little kick.

Delicious.

So I’m trying cork’d, the new web-based wine-tracker. It’s a keen idea, and looks very nice. You enter information about the wines you own, and about the wines you try, and that information is shared with the cork’d community. You can add “drinking buddies” — Rich has already joined me, and maybe Jeremy will someday. (If you want to join, let me know, and I’ll e-mail you so that we automatically buddy up.)

But the thing is, cork’d is frustrating to use. It feels like an application where the designers were able to get it to work for them and the way they work with this information, but failed to test it in the real-world. (I’m not saying that this is what occurred; it just feels that way.) It’s also an application that’s prettier than it is functional. (It’s very pretty.)

Here are some specific things that bug me about cork’d. (And this list comes after only entering half a dozen bottles!)

The idea is that this is a social wine site. That is, after one person has entered the data for a particular bottle of wine, anyone else can use that information without having to re-enter it themselves. For example, here’s a bottle of two-buck chuck. If you go down to Trader Joe’s and pick up a case of this, you don’t have to enter the data because it’s already in the system.

But what if you find the wine you want and the information is incorrect? That is, what if you find this entry for the exact same bottle of two-buck chuck. What do you do? Well, you probably try to create one of your own. So right away, there’s one problem: with a system like that, you’re likely to have multiple instances of the same bottle of wine.

So should the designers limit the information that people can enter? That presents problems, too. Speaking from my own experience, here’s a bottle of Willamette Valley Vineyards 2003 Pinot Noir that I’d like to add to my wine cellar. The information is basically correct, except for two things:

1. This user paid $23.99 for his bottle — I paid $14.89 the same wine. It does me no good to have this in my cellar with his pricing information. I want my pricing information.
2. The region listed is wrong. Yes, it might make sense that a bottle from a Salem winery called “Willamette Valley Vineyards” would have an appellation of “Oregon – Willamette Valley”, but in reality the correct appellation for this body is simply “Oregon”. A small thing, but it bugs me. I’m not allowed to edit this information if I want to add the bottle to my cork’d wine cellar.

So what should I do? Create a new entry for this wine? That seems like a poor choice. But I don’t want to use the info as-is, either. It’s a stalemate, which basically means I don’t enter the wine at all, and I write a weblog entry complaining about the website.

There are other problems, too, such as:

• cork’d calls appellations “regions”. I can deal with that, I suppose, but I can’t deal with the fact that you have to choose your region from a drop-down menu of pre-defined choices, a menu that out of seven bottles, was missing two of the regions I wanted. I want a way to add appellations.
• I’m attempting to add all of my wines to my cork’d wine cellar at the same time. First, there’s no obvious way to add a wine from the front page at all. I eventually found out how to do so by clicking to a different page where adding a wine was an option. But why not on the front page, too? And after I add each bottle of wine, I’m taken to that bottle’s individual page. That’s fine, but there’s now way to just immediately add my next bottle of wine from this page. I have to click through a bunch of stuff again.
• I want a “personal notes” field — something that isn’t a review, but something that isn’t a “description” either. I want to keep track of where I bought a wine, or who gave it to me. I just entered “purchased at Costco on 07 October 2006” for several bottles in the description field, and now that’s part of the permanent record. Oops. But it doesn’t belong in a review, either. It’s a personal note.
• The search system seems broken. Searching for “willamette valley vineyards pinot” generates a “can’t find it” message, even though there are several wines that should return matches. But searching for “willamette valley vineyards” works as expected.
• When I add a wine to my cellar from search, I’m given a choice of how many bottles to add, but when I add one by entering the data, I’m not. It just enters one bottle. If I actually bought four, I have to go to my cellar, find the bottle, and change the quantity there.
• I’d love the ability to add actual images of each bottle instead of the generic graphics that are currently used.
• Wines are rated using an Amazon-like star system. My ratings are shown in a sort of brightish pinkish red. If I haven’t rated a wine, its rating is shown in a sort of darkish winish red. This is fine if both colors are on the same page, but when they’re not, I have a hard time remembering whether what I’m seeing is my rating or the system-wide average.

Don’t get me wrong. I like cork’d and think it’s a fun idea. I’m hoping that several friends will join and we can have quite the drinking party. But in its current form, it feels very much like a piece of software in beta.

I like the idea of Cork’d but it still feels very beta to me…