August 12, 2016 Lunch. East Ocean. Dinner – High Desert Shell Club dinner with Clafoutis
I picked up Peter Eller and we went to lunch at East Ocean. We both ordered Scallops in Lobster Sauce, one of my favorite dishes.
After lunch I confirmed that the shell club dinner was still happening. Since Bruce moved to College Station, Texas, we get together only for a summer meeting and a Christmas dinner.
I knew I was going to make clafoutis for the party, so Wednesday evening I had pitted the bag of cherries I bought at Lowe’s on Monday and added about 2 T. of cognac to them to brandy them.
At 4:00 on Friday I started making the clafoutis. I scalded 2 cups of half and half combined with 1 cup of whole miIk and then let it cool. I put 7 T. of flour and 10 T. of confectioner’s powdered sugar in a large bowl, made a well in the center and added three whole eggs and combined the flour, sugar and eggs with a wooden spoon. I then added the slightly cooled scalded milk and stirred with the wooden spoon until most of the lumps were dissolved. I buttered a ceramic baking dish and coated the butter with granulated sugar. Then I added the cherries and the residual Brandy to the other ingredients, stirred them one time to combine the ingredients and then poured the entire mixture into the ceramic baking dish and baked it in a convection oven with heat on both the top and bottom for 50 minutes at 350 degrees.
When the clafoutis was ready, we left for the party at Tom and Donnie’s house in Rio Rancho. Four of the five remaining members were in attendance, Mike Sanchez and his wife, Bruce, Tom, Pat, and me and Suzette.
One of the odd things about shell collecting is some folks are passionate about it and will pay lots of money for shells when new shells are discovered, but over time as fishermen learn of their value, more shells will come onto the market and the prices will drop dramatically. The opposite is also true, that as fishermen over fish for the shells and degrade habitats, some shells go extinct and become rarer and thus more expensive.
Tom and Donnie roasted potatoes, onions and Brussels Sprouts and grilled a marinated roast of beef and Pat brought a tray of fresh vegetables, so we had a lovely dinner and talked about many things, mostly related to the world of biology, such as the recent dating of the age of some of the Greenland sharks as the oldest living vertebrates at over 400 years of age and how some North Atlantic and Arctic clams have been dated to be over 600 years old. The consensus in the group was that animals grow much more slowly in cold water than in warm water and due to differences in nutrition from year to year they record their age in their shells for mollusk by rights of shell growth and in the Sharks by the whorls in their eyes.
Mike’s wife baked a lovely cherry cake from a recipe in the Huckleberry Bakery’s cookbook. The Huckleberry Bakery and café is a famous bakery located in Santa Monica, California. The cake was delicious. Mike’s wife told us the bakery likes to mix ingredients with different textures and the cherry cake contained some corn meal to give it a slightly gritty texture.
After dinner we all viewed the small paratype shells of a Nerite that Tom named after Pat and Pat gave away her murex collection and the last of her fossil shells to the other members of the group tonight. A paratype is one of the shells relied upon to identify a new species or sub-species of shell, but not the holotype. The holotype is the specimen of the shell deemed most most representative of the shell. The holotype is usually in a museum collection. Since Tom identified the shell, I think he sent the holotype to the Bailey Matthews Shell Museum ion Sanibel Island in Florida, but he kept the paratypes in his collection of over 7500 different shells. Bruce has over 6500 different shells in his collection. Each has lots of duplicate shells, so their collections are massive. Tom recently published the first of a two volume set of guides to the Nerite species.
Mike, who works at the New Mexico Museum of Science and History, told us about the progress the Museum is making in mounting a permanent display of a large shell collection is was given.
After Pat left we all picked specimens of her murex shells and cone shells we liked or needed and I picked a large fossil specimen of a whelk and some of the cones and murex eps. Pat lived near Sarasota, Florida for a few years and she used to go to the fossilized shell beds there and dig out shells, such as the large whelk. Here is a picture of the shells we picked.
At 9:00 after a very pleasant evening we went home.
Bon Appetit
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