Razor Clamming

Growing up, I was a very picky eater.  My parents might capitalize and bold the word very.  In fact, now that I have my own picky eater, I empathize with my parents.  Fortunately, I grew out of it.  I have since acquired many tastes and likes for food that I never imagined I would.  Everything from tomatoes to artichokes to peppers I can now eat without gagging.  In fact, I enjoy them.  I used to sit at the dinner table for hours just staring at my food, thinking of ways to hide it without my parents knowing.  Now I sit at the dinner table for hours waiting for my son to eat (life is full of little ironies), but that's a different story, and I digress.

Despite my maturation in food tastes, however, there are still a number of foods I can't stomach.  One in particular brings back memories of my hours at the the dinner table, and I cannot bring myself to eat it.  CLAM CHOWDER!  To be fair, the chowder itself is not gross.  I love other kinds of chowder--salmon chowder, potato chowder, corn chowder, etc.  But clam chowder has an added ingredient which makes the whole thing taste awful.  The clam.  In my opinion, clams taste like little balls of chicken fat.  Their taste is overpowered by their horribly disgusting texture.  And now, to add insult to injury, this weekend I saw those little puppies alive rather than dead in my soup, and clam chowder is officially a thing of the past.  If I thought there was a small chance that I might give them another try, it has now been permanently banished from my mind.

Josh, Eli, and I went razor clamming with his parents yesterday.  Apparently, our little neck of the woods is well known for the sport, and to be honest, it's pretty fun.  It's sort of like digging for treasure, and there is quite an exhilaration when you dig up one of those clams.  You can use a shovel, but I think you have to be really good to use that method.  Most everyone uses a clam gun (pictured below).  Even then, you have to work quickly because they are fast and can burrow themselves deep into the sand.  As it is, they are already in the sand, and you have to have an eye for finding them so you can know where to dig in the first place.  X does not mark the spot, but there are little divots in the sand.  You go around looking for those little divots, and then you push your clam gun down into the sand at the spot.  When you bring the gun back up, you bring sand up with it, and hopefully a clam to boot.  Josh sometimes had to dig his hand into the sand if the gun didn't go deep enough.  I let him do the dirty work.  I kept my hands above the sand, but I did find a number of clams and discovered that maybe I have quite a talent for finding those little divots. :-)

Razor clams are quite large, and not at all what I had pictured clams to look like.  They are definitely not the most attractive things in the world with their wormy tongue-like bodies that protrude from the shell (sorry if I'm making you all dislike clam chowder now).  I let Josh kill and cut them out so that he can make clam chowder for himself to enjoy. :-)  For me, clamming is a case of the means being better than the end.  

The best time to go clamming is at low tide, so we got to see a beautiful sunset.