June 15, 2012 Spaghetti with Clams and Fresh Vegetables

June 15, 2012 Spaghetti with Clams and Fresh Vegetables

            On Friday I went to Costco and there was a Seafood Fiesta, so I bought 4.6 lb.s of clams.  Suzette drove in from Santa Rosa and said she was too tired to cook, so I had to cook dinner.  We discussed what might work and we decided to make a one dish meal with pasta and the clams.  I looked for a new recipe that would use our ingredients and not use the ¼ lb. of butter that Suzette usually uses and found a good recipe on page 261 in Pol Martin’s Supreme Cuisine Cook Book that called for no butter.

Here it is:

32 fresh clams (I cooked all the 90 or so clams)

1 cup water (I increased the water to 2 – 2 ½ cups) 

1 Tbsp. olive oil

1 Tbsp. butter

3 shallots, peeled and chopped

2 garlic cloves, smashed and chopped

2 green onions, chopped

1 green bell pepper, diced

2 large tomatoes, peeled and chopped (I substituted ½ cup of sofrito sauce)

1 Tbsp. tarragon

4 portions of linguine (I substituted 1/2 lb. of spaghetti)

juice of 1 lemon

salt and pepper

Put the lemon juice in the water with the clams (it took three cycles to cook all the 4.6 lb.s or approximately 90 clams) and heat the water to a boil and stir once or twice and boil the clams until they open. Discard any unopened shells.  We shucked most of the clams from their shells, except six used to garnish the dish.

Then I heated the oil and butter in a large skillet over medium heat and added the shallots, garlic and green onions and sauteed for 4 minutes over low heat.  Then add the green pepper and tomatoes and cook 12 minutes over medium heat.  I had no tomatoes, so I added the sofrito (sofrito is a Spanish cooking sauce principally made with tomatoes that is typically used in paella) near the end of the twelve minutes.  Because the slofrito was already a sauce and I had to add some clam juice to emulsify the sauce to a loose consistency.  Then I added the clams and cooked them in the sauce for several minutes over low heat to heat them.   I really like the addition of the sofrito and clam juice to make a sauce.

When the pasta was cooked we plated up the pasta and spooned sauce over it.  We drank Spanish Albarino wine with the dish. 

I loved the fact that there is very little or no butter in this recipe.  It is a low fat dish with lots of fresh vegetables, perfect for summer.

Bon appétit