CULINARY ADVENTURES
Cindy Maddera
Saturday nights are our nights for kitchen adventures. We hunt down some new ingredient or challenging recipe and then we wreck the kitchen in our efforts to create a culinary master piece. Many of you have read here about the time we murdered live lobsters in our quest to recreate Boston lobster rolls. This is what we do for fun on a Saturday night. The idea for our most recent Saturday culinary adventure started brewing earlier in the week when Michael sent me an email he gets from one of our Asian food markets. Geoducks were on sale. I tentatively replied with “I don’t know.” He then sent me video of some guy preparing one and I quickly responded with a hard NO. He sent me a second video that I did not watch because the image on the screen was too much. I was at work and it was inappropriate.
What is a geoduck?
It’s pronounced ‘gooey duck’ and it is a clam that is too big for its shell. This native West coast clam by all accounts and descriptions is the sweetest, most delicious thing in the ocean. It also looks like a giant porn penis. The soft part of its body cannot retract back into the shell and just hangs out looking inappropriate. If the clam is boiled, the soft part hardens and you get the idea. Eat a dick is the phrase that comes to mind. So I was all ‘nope’ to Michael’s plans for geoduck. We had a long conversation about it and I finally agreed on one condition. I was to have no part in the preparation of Saturday’s meal. My contribution to this particular culinary adventure was to sit on the couch drinking gin. A total win for me and he was making French fries. I would at least have French fries.
Michael prepared the geoduck two ways. The first way he served it was raw, sliced thin and placed on sushi rice. This was okay. It has a weird but not off putting crunch to it and it was kind of chewy. It wasn’t horrible but it wasn’t my favorite. For the rest of the geoduck, he battered it in panko and fried them. The first time I had whole belly fried clams was when Talaura and I went to Maine. I ate one and thought “MY WHOLE LIFE IS SHAM!” because up until then, the only thing I knew of fried clams were the fried clam strips you get at Long John Silver’s. Those are fried rubber bands. A fried clam, a real fried clam, is similar to a fried oyster. It is rich and meaty and sweet. It is delicious. The geoduck, fried in a panko batter, was very very similar to those Maine fried clams. They were delicious and the French fries were stellar.
The geoduck is totally worth eating. The key is to have someone else make it for you. Just sit back, drink some gin and have no part in the preparation.