New York Times columnist John Tierney is as taken with all this as I am, and he ran a little experiment a couple years ago in which he asked readers to list their ten most expensive purchases, and the ten purchases that gave them the most happiness. The point was to find the overlap.

And he found it. Houses, college, travel, home electronics, and some kinds of cars (a wide range, from Jaguar to Honda Civic) delivered in the happiness department. But lots of other purchases didn’t. Take out things we have to spend money on, like insurance and taxes, and the big expenses that didn’t make people happy were children, wedding ceremonies, and all the cars that weren’t on the other list.

And boats. If it’s happiness you’re after, says Tierney, “Never buy a boat.”

I knew that when we decided, over the winter, to buy a boat. Specifically, we bought a 23-foot Steigercraft, tricked out with all the electronics a fisherman could want, and an F250 diesel truck to pull it. For us, it definitely qualified as a major purchase. The only thing we’ve ever bought that was more expensive is the house we live in, and that was a purchase of a different order. Real estate often holds its value. Sometimes, it even appreciates. The value of boats and trucks, though, just dwindles down to nothing.

To add insult to injury, you have to keep putting money in as the value dwindles. For starters, there’s gas. An awful lot of gas. Then there’s registration and taxes, every year, on the boat, the truck, and the trailer. There’s maintenance. Repair. Eco-friendly chemicals to get the caterpillar-shit stains off the gunwales. It never ends.

A boat, in short, is expensive.

Our previous boat, a 19-foot Eastern, cost a lot less. (And it isn’t ‘previous’ quite yet – it’s for sale at Millway Marina, and priced to move.) We could tow it with a smaller truck, it took a lot less gas, and had many fewer things that could go wrong. And we got a lot of excellent fishing done in it. The decision to step up to a bigger boat was non-trivial, and we made it because we have found, in the four years that we’ve been here, that we love to fish.

It’s not just the fishing. If you come here often, you’ve heard me say it before and I hope you’ll forgive me for saying it again: some of our very best days have been just the two of us, on the boat together. There was one day, one summer, at Horseshoe Shoal that was for me almost emblematic of happiness. Bright sun, calm sea, biting bluefish, and Kevin and me.

We want more days like that, and so we bought a bigger boat.

But you never know how things like this will turn out. The bigger boat could just be a bigger headache. It could be a hassle to trailer, and to launch. Its bigger size and deeper draft could limit us. More electronics means more things to go wrong. You never know.

So I am happy to report that the boat bought us a day like yesterday.

We woke up to fog and a little bit of spitting drizzle. There was a wind out of the south-east, not too bad, but enough to blow up two-foot seas in Nantucket Sound. We hadn’t planned to fish, but the boat was all set up in the driveway because we’d gone the day before. (And the day before that, and the day before that – Kevin’s brother Marty had been visiting, and it was all fishing, all the time.)

We were still drinking our first cup of coffee when I ventured to suggest we could go out to try for bluefish. We had caught some the day before, trolling with top lures, but we sent Marty home with them because every single one had been hooked by his rod. (It’s always that way with Marty, and I don’t understand it.)

Kevin was game. All we had to do was load the cooler and ice onto the boat, dress for rain, and go.

This was not a day we would have taken the Eastern out because we would have been neither safe nor comfortable. Dreamcatcher (we’re keeping the name), though, could take a day like that and much, much more. She’s got proper navigation lights, as well as both radar and GPS. We can see other boats and make sure they see us. Although we wouldn’t voluntarily go out in pea soup, a day with half-mile visibility isn’t a problem.

Electronics on a foggy day

Out in the Sound, about a mile offshore, we had the place to ourselves. I am a water sissy, and that used to make me nervous, but I feel much better in a boat that has the aforementioned radar and GPS as well as two batteries, a relatively new motor, and all recommended safety equipment. We have a marine radio that can send an automated distress signal with our location at the touch of a button, and we have a back-up, hand-held radio in case we lose all power. We have paper charts. We have a compass. We have two waterproof cell phones, and an up-to-date SeaTow membership. In weather that’s even a little dirty, we wear inflatable PFDs.

We were safe, and we were comfortable. The enclosed pilot house meant that the only time we weren’t sheltered was when we were setting up or taking in rods, or dealing with a fish. We went on the same troll we’d done the day before, trailing three lines with poppers, lures that bounce on the surface of the water. And we used our autopilot!

Yes, we have autopilot, and it is my candidate for the coolest thing ever. You can set a destination, or a route, or simply a heading. Press a button, and the boat takes over the steering while you control the speed.

There are a couple reasons that this is the coolest thing ever. For starters, the boat is much better at holding a course than you are. Driving a boat isn’t like driving a car; it’s very difficult to maintain a straight line. The better you are at it, the more efficient your boat is. You can burn a lot of extra gas zigging and zagging and correcting and over-correcting. I can’t hold a line to save my life, but the autopilot has mad skills and keeps us virtually dead on. If you set a destination it even accounts for drift!

Being able to set the autopilot for trolling means, first, that your lines are less likely to tangle because the boat holds its course. It also means that there is an extra set of hands, the hands that would have been on the wheel, available to help with the fishing. The danger of autopilot is that you can be lulled into not paying attention to where you’re going, and we make sure to keep a lookout at all times. We also make sure the radar is on, and set to sound an alarm if another boat gets close.

We were safe, we were comfortable, and we caught three nice bluefish. Not an epic fishing day, certainly, but exactly the kind of morning we wanted this boat for. Just Kevin and me, trolling for bluefish. Our lives are a little overcrowded, and being on the boat together, thinking about nothing but fish, ratchets us down a bit. As we came in, we saw a boat named “Off Switch,” and I thought it was apt.

The time may come when I curse the day we bought the boat. There are many boat-related scenarios involving time, money, and danger that could be enough to make me swear off boat-ownership forever. But for now, the boat – and what it lets us do – makes me happy.

Not only does it give us days like yesterday, it also lets us take people with us. We have friends who either don’t have a boat, or keep their boat in the water and don’t have the flexibility to fish both sides of the Cape, and we very much enjoy bringing them out to where the fish are. The boat also gives us fish. So far, a lot of fish – to date, we’ve landed about 60 pounds of striped bass filets (a bounty we’ve been able to share with friends), eight pounds of bluefish (drying in preparation for smoking, as we speak), and a pound of mackerel (which I pickled in an experiment I’m close to declaring a success). If we were keeping score, that would be about a thousand dollars’ worth, retail value, all caught in three weeks.

We’re not keeping score, because there’s no way we’ll ever come out ahead. What we spend on the boat and the upkeep would keep us in fish for the rest of our lives, and the fish don’t justify the boat. The happiness justifies the boat. The time out of mind justifies the boat.

Days like yesterday justify the boat.

You might also enjoy:

1. The bigger boat It was just a couple of weeks ago that I...
2. A much bigger boat Anyone in the market for a boat quickly finds out...
3. All in the same boat The stripers are here. Every year, at about this time,...

Yesterday afternoon, we ditched them all to go fishing. Again. We’d had such a good trip on Saturday, and the weather was so glorious, that we couldn’t resist. Not only did we walk away from all our responsibilities, we convinced Gus to walk away from his, too.

Gus is our friend and our mechanic. Fish swim in his veins, perhaps because he is Greek. (His real name is Konstantin, but when he came here from Greece as a young man and applied for a Sears credit card, his full name was too long for the form. “You can be Charlie,” they told him, “or you can be Gus.”) He speaks with the kind of mellifluous Mediterranean accent that makes you think everything’s going to be ok. Which is an excellent bonus in the person who fixes your car.

Last fall, when Kevin and I drove down to North Carolina for our friend Allison Fishman’s wedding, I took our Saab to Gus before we left, since the suspension was making a rather ominous creaking sound. Gus drove the car and heard the creaking, but he wasn’t going to be able to open up the suspension in time to find what it was, fix it, and get it back to us.

“Can I take it North Carolina?” I asked, worried.

“I had a guy once who had a camper,” Gus said, with his mellifluous Mediterranean accent, “and he wanted to take it to California. ‘Gus,’ he asked me, ‘can I take it to California?’”

“’Look,’ I told him, ‘if you have a donkey, you can get to California. You stop, you give it hay, you give it water, you keep going. Take the camper to California. If it breaks down, you stop and you call. They come, they tow, they fix, you keep going.”

“Tamara,” he said to me, “take the car to North Carolina.”

I laughed. “But you’ll fix it when I get back?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“No?”

“No,” he said, and pointed to the offending suspension. “You have to wait for it to get worse.”

When I bring a car to him, we talk about cars for a minute or two, and then we talk about food We first met Gus when he was roasting a lamb on a rotisserie he built out of a washing machine motor, and we knew he was our kind of person. He keeps a smoker in his garage, and smokes a mean bluefish. And, if you ever meet him, ask him to tell you the story about going through customs at JFK with a frozen suckling pig. (“What is that?” the officer asked him. “What do you mean, ‘What is that,’” Gus said. “It’s a pig.”)

Gus

When I called him yesterday morning to ask if he wanted to go for stripers, I could hear the conflict in his voice. He said he had a lot of work, but I could tell he really, really, wanted to go fishing. He said he would try and get everything done, and call me at noon. At noon, he was in.

He met us at the dock at 2:30, and out we went. The plan was the same as Saturday’s: jig up a couple dozen mackerel, and liveline them for stripers. We went out to our usual mackerel spot, though, and found no fish. A few (apparently) on the fishfinder, but none on the sabiki rigs.

I was a little concerned. This was the first time we’d taken Gus out with us, and I didn’t want him to think we were the kind of loser fishermen who fish at random, having no real idea what they’re doing. But the mackerel aren’t always easy to find, and we had time. We saw a few boats farther out in the Bay, and we figured they might be into them, so we headed in that direction.

Sure enough, we hit them. Since I was jigging off one side of the boat and Gus was on the other, I didn’t see him pull in his first fish, but Kevin told me that he lit up. You know how much someone likes to fish by his expression when he gets a bite, and Gus really likes to fish.

It didn’t take us long to fill Kevin’s livewell, and then we headed back to the mouth of Barnstable Harbor to try our luck for stripers.

The theory behind this kind of fishing is that the striped bass go into the harbor to feed when the tide comes in, and then are just about forced out when the tide ebbs. The channel out of the harbor is narrow, and it funnels all the fish into one little spot. Go there on the outgoing tide, at the right time of year, with the right kind of bait, and your chances are good.

We went to the harbor end of the channel and Kevin cut the motor. Gus reached into the livewell, put a mackerel on his hook, and tossed it over the side. Before I had a chance to bait my own hook, Gus had a striper on the line. Literally. It took about seven seconds.

And that’s how the day went. We had striper action for a good two hours. Some of the fish were schoolies, and we watched as the bass chased the mackerel around the surface of the water even though they were too small to eat them. We use a kind of hook, a circle hook, that’s designed to minimize the chance that the fish gets gut-hooked, but is also relatively easy for the fish to shake, so we lost a couple big fish we’d had on the line.

But we caught plenty. Gus got his two (the limit) before either Kevin or I had landed one, but I also ended up limiting out, and Kevin got one. One of mine was just shy of three feet long, and may be the biggest fish I’ve caught to date.

Today, all the things we didn’t get done yesterday are still there, and we have that much less time in which to do them. But they will get done – or maybe they won’t, I don’t know. But I do know that we had a great day on the water. We also came home with about 15 pounds of striped bass filets, and Gus had almost as much, plus the leftover mackerel.

We happen to live in a place with world-class fishing, and Kevin and I have decided to make taking advantage of it a priority. On the days when the fishing looks promising and the weather is good, we’re willing to let other things slide to go out and try our luck. It is a luxury to be able to do that. An indulgent, time-consuming, expensive luxury, and one I feel lucky to have. Because I really love to fish.

You might also enjoy:

1. Fishing in my sleep We’ve been ice fishing for about a week now, and...
2. There’s fishing, and then there’s catching I’ve discovered the secret to fishing. I now know the...
3. Pan-fried fluke Kevin cooked our fluke.  This is how he did it....

He made the call to the contact in the ad, to a woman named Lucy. She was in Bourne, about fifteen miles from us, and Kevin told Lucy that I’d come pick them up.

“Wait,” Lucy said. “Your name is Kevin and your wife’s name is Tamar?” Kevin confirmed.

“Are you Starving off the Land?”

Turns out that Lucy is a regular reader and commenter! Which means there’s a kind of goes-around-comes-around rightness in turning her tubs into our livewell.

I zipped over with a check, and Lucy and I put the tubs in the car, talking about chickens and bees and gardens. We kept talking for quite some time, and could have gone on all day, I suspect, if both of us didn’t have to get back to work.

I brought Lucy’s tubs to Kevin for inspection. They were perfect. And if the first one didn’t work out, we had a back-up.

The tub was the big hurdle, but Kevin needed a few other things to get the job done. We needed a lid that was heavy enough to stay put when the boat was moving, made of a material that could withstand salt water, and fittings to attach the input hose at the bottom of the tub and the outflow hose near the top.

For the lid, we went with stuff called Azek, which is essentially boards made out of PVC. We learned about Azek from Bob (our friend, fishing instructor, and builder), who used it as trim when he put new doors and windows in our house. We bought one board, and Kevin cut a piece about two inches wide to span the top of the tub and snap in under the rim. Then he added semi-circles of Azek to each side of the center span with hinges, to make the lid you can lift up to put fish in or take them out.

Once that was done, it was just a question of hose fittings. Our boat has a pump that pumps in seawater for washing the deck, so we had a ready-made water supply. Kevin used a washing-machine hose to connect the pump to the bottom of the tub, and made the intake with PVC fittings and fluffy rubber washers to make sure it was watertight.

PVC and fluffy washers also connected a wider outflow hose about five inches from the top of the tub (to leave room for sloshing), and that hose was long enough to drain the water off the back of the boat, over the transom.

This past weekend, we used it for the first time. Would it work?

It worked!

You might also enjoy:

1. Starving, the Prequel: Manhattan rooftop gardening Back before the enlightenment ......
2. The bigger boat It was just a couple of weeks ago that I...
3. Better gardening through chemistry The problem with gardening is that you have to do...

We went out to the head of the channel, about two miles outside the harbor, and jigged up a couple dozen mackerel to use as bait. Then we went back to the harbor and did loops drifting from the mouth out to the bay, livelining the mackerel.  When we got to the head of the channel, we’d motor back and do again, floating with the tide as it went out.

At first, there was nothing. And then, there were bass. By the time the day was over, we had each caught one. Both fish were 32 inches. Both fish were 11 pounds. They were virtually identical. We had caught them exactly the same way, on very similar tackle. So why does Kevin look like a manly boat captain, holding the fish that is the due of a skilled fisherman …

… and I just look like a dork?

You might also enjoy:

1. Joining the club Our lobster pots have been sitting out in Cape Cod...
2. First fish The stripers are back! Last week, Kevin took the big...
3. Mastering the cold fish I’m guessing your patience with my fishing stories is wearing...

Before I could find out that I’m actually pretty good at knots, I had to get over the concept that there were so many kinds of them. Going in, I was familiar only with good, old overhand knot and its close relative, the square knot. I had no idea that were – literally – hundreds of knots in the world. (And you can learn to tie them all at Animated Knots by Grog, an excellent site.)  Why would we need a cleat hitch, a clove hitch, a strap hitch, a buntline hitch, and an anchor hitch? Is hitching so very complicated? There’s the klemheist, the zeppelin bend, the half Windsor, and the double Gloucester, not to mention the now-discredited sheepshank, which doesn’t hold with slippery modern synthetic rope. The list goes on.

Our boating class, though, dealt only with the basics. We learned the clove hitch, the sheet bend, the figure-eight knot, and that seaman’s essential, the bowline.

A bowline is a knot that forms a loop, excellent for tying something to a rail or post. It has the twin virtues of holding fast when it’s under load and being easy to untie when that load is removed. It is such a common, useful knot that there’s a little story to help the knot-tier remember how it goes.

The knot starts with an overhand loop, and the knot’s narrative has that as a rabbit hole, with the end of the rope being the rabbit. The rabbit comes out of his hole, as the story goes, hops behind the tree, sees the fox, and goes back in the hole. Voila! Bowline.

I watched the instructor do it once, and then tried it on my very own piece of rope. It wasn’t hard. Voila! Bowline.

Kevin, though, has his own little story. His rabbit comes out of his hole, goes back for his wallet, gets distracted by his girlfriend, and ends up all tangled up, doing what rabbits do. Kevin is undeterred by his tangle, and looks at my nice, neat bowline skeptically. “No honey,” he says patiently, showing me his rat’s nest, “This is what it’s supposed to look like.”

The only way to keep your knotting skills fresh is to practice, and I wanted to run through my new repertoire a couple of times yesterday to try and make it stick. The rope, though, was in the garage. What was in the house was leftover pizza dough. And everyone knows the best thing to make with leftover pizza dough is knots. Garlic knots.

Why is it that every garlic knot is a plain old overhand knot? Why can’t we have a garlic klemheist? A garlic sheepshank? The answer: We can! I give you garlic boating knots: bowline, sheet bend, figure eight, square knot, slip knot, and the good, old overhand.

Top row, left to right: bowline, sheet bend, figure eight. Bottom row: square knot, slip knot, overhand knot.

(I should mention that, if you want to make garlic knots of whatever style, and you happen not to have leftover pizza dough in the house, you can find excellent instructions from my friend Hank Shaw (via the ever-reliable Simply Recipes), or from the enormously talented Diane and Todd at White on Rice.)

Kevin is not yet ready to acknowledge my knot-tying superiority, but he has an explanation ready against the day he has to. He claims that, if I am indeed the superior knot-tier, it is because I practice a slavish adherence to the word of authority, that I simply do what I’m told. He, of course, is the critical thinker, the independent problem-solver, the iconoclast.

I naturally say this is hogwash, and it seems clear that the evidence is on my side. My history of being a thorn in authority’s side is long and well-documented, beginning with my being elected “Teacher’s Pest” in high school, in a landslide that had me winning with 80% of the vote when you could vote for anyone. It continued with being fired from jobs. Good jobs. If required, I can produce affidavits from authority figures everywhere – teachers, bosses, doctors, government bureaucrats – attesting to just how irritating I can be.

Kevin says we need to wait until we take the boat out and have to tie knots for real to see who’s better at it. I say I’m sure he will, once we are under weigh, tie a perfectly respectable bowline. Knot!

You might also enjoy:

1. Garlic bulbils — in a pasta sauce If you already know what bulbils are, you’re way ahead...
2. Ramps, with cabbage and peanut sauce I sauteed a mess of them with about half a...
3. Mastering the cold fish I’m guessing your patience with my fishing stories is wearing...

We chose our boat because it is the biggest boat you can comfortably tow, and that’s using ‘comfortably’ loosely. Lots of people – even tough guys – look at our boat and want nothing to do with towing it. I definitely look at our boat and want nothing to do with towing it. Kevin, though, was born to tow.

Kevin yearns for anything involving heavy equipment or danger, and towing qualifies on both counts. Just to make it more fun, the trailer on our boat is a little long in the tooth.

I know you see a story coming, particularly since those of you who visit frequently know we have towing-disaster experience. But, just this once, I’m going to have to disappoint you. It went as smoothly as it possibly could have.

Partly, that’s because, to go with the boat, Kevin bought a Ford F250 Super Duty pick-up with a 6.4-liter diesel engine and 650 foot-pounds of torque. If you are unfamiliar with trucks, or torque, I can assure you that ours is a mean, diesel-guzzling, towing machine, and our boat, which probably weighs about 4000 pounds, is well within its capacity.

And partly, it’s because Kevin’s just really, really good at towing things.

If you’ve never towed anything, it’s hard to imagine what could be difficult. If you’ve towed things, you know that many things are difficult, but none quite so difficult as backing up.

In order to make your trailer go in one direction when you’re backing up, you have to make your truck go in the other direction. Although this a bedrock principle of physics, it is absolutely counter-intuitive. Unless you are really, really good at towing things, you will make your trailer go in the wrong direction on a regular basis. I certainly do.

The rear view

Then there’s the issue of visibility. When all you can see in the rear-view mirror is the bow of your giant boat, you are completely dependent on your side-view mirrors. There are special side-view mirrors (“towing mirrors,” they’re called, helpfully) that stick out farther than normal and have both normal mirrors and special fun-house mirrors that give you the fish-eye view of what’s behind you.  We have those.

Towing mirror view

Then there’s the issue of ramps. For starters, a boat ramp is often narrow. The bigger your boat, the less wiggle room you have. Just to make it harder, there are usually other people waiting to put boats in or take boats out, and they want you to work fast.

Even if there aren’t other boats waiting, there are often spectators. Rampies, I call them. They’re the guys (always guys) who just stand around waiting for you to fuck up.

Since this was our first time launching the boat, Kevin recruited our friend Bob to come with us. Bob has vast experience with boats, and owns a boat the same size as ours. We figured he’d come in handy.

And so he did. There are tricks to getting boats off trailers, and we had to employ one or two. But we got it off in perfectly respectable time. The one boat waiting put in right after us, and the rampies went home disappointed.

If I had to pick two guys to get a boat into the water, it would definitely be Kevin and Bob. If I had to pick two guys to figure out all the fancy-pants Raymarine electronics in that boat, well … let’s just say there was a lot of “what happens if you press that button?” I was tempted to try to decipher some of the blips myself, but I didn’t think I’d be any better at it, and I thought it was unlikely Raymarine would manufacture fancy-pants electronics with an ejector seat, so what was the worst that could happen?

Kevin and Bob

The worst that could happen? I’ll tell you the worst that could happen. The worst that could happen would be that I would decide that, from here on in, I am done with open boats. Over the last few years, Kevin and I spent many hours on our trusty Eastern, and I had somehow internalized the idea that being cold and wet was an integral part of boating. I bought a whole wardrobe of foul-weather gear and always went out with more layers than a baklava.

Hah! If you have the right boat, you can go boating in your underwear!

It was about fifty degrees out, and relatively calm, and anyone who’s ever been out on the water on a day like that knows how raw it can feel. But I wasn’t cold for one single solitary second. I sat in the cabin with my feet up and had fun watching Kevin and Bob decipher the radar and the autopilot. I even had a beer. It was glorious.

Coming out

The boat came out of the water as easily as she went in, and we took her home and hosed her down. (Those of you who participated in the boat-naming exercise should know that we are keeping Dream Catcher for now, only because we are too damn cheap to change it and, anyway, we couldn’t pick from the many excellent suggestions.) Now all we have to do is read the Raymarine manuals and wait for the fish.

It’s going to be a good season.

You might also enjoy:

1. The bigger boat It was just a couple of weeks ago that I...
2. Math-man-ship Buying boats is like playing leapfrog. You buy a boat,...
3. The survivor Today, as I was cleaning up the kitchen and Kevin...

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

You might also enjoy:

1. Littlenecks! We’ve found many excellent uses for large clams, but there’s...
2. Clams in red clam sauce We were too late to catch the low tide, so...
3. Clams and oysters in chowder I had oysters and clams in the freezer, and I...

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.

You might also enjoy:

1. The bigger boat It was just a couple of weeks ago that I...
2. Math-man-ship Buying boats is like playing leapfrog. You buy a boat,...
3. A much bigger boat Anyone in the market for a boat quickly finds out...

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.

You might also enjoy:

1. The bigger boat It was just a couple of weeks ago that I...
2. Drumroll, please! And now, for the results of the boat-naming contest. But...
3. All in the same boat The stripers are here. Every year, at about this time,...

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

You might also enjoy:

1. Littlenecks! We’ve found many excellent uses for large clams, but there’s...
2. Sea salt was the best I could do There were clams in the fridge. There was also clam...
3. Clam sauce It’s usually littlenecks that go into classic white clam sauce...