A clam by any other name...

...would still taste delicious.

As a Sunday afternoon pleasantry, my father went clamming yesterday in the harbor of St. James. (You give the guy a day off and he does what I deem to be work. Go figure.) He returned as the sky was dark enough to warrant a "WHERE ARE YOU DID YOU GET SUCKED INTO THE MUD" phone call from my mom with 93 clams that I counted while a gargantuan June bug terrorized me by dive-bombing my head.

"Tomorrow is the day you learn to make clams." My mom said as we climbed the stairs to go to bed.

Anyone who has been at a Kieltyka family party or simply been lucky enough to stop by when we decided to have them knows that my mother's clams are a thing to behold. If we have them at a party, never mind the pool, the drinks, the music; the clams are the event. At Cody's graduation party, I walked in to hear the waitresses we hired pausing for a break as they put another tray into the oven to brown.

"I literally have never seen anything like this in my life," she said. "They're going insane for these clams."

"I know!" the other one said, wiping sweat off her forehead. "A table actually just paid me to bring them some when this batch comes out. What's in those clams? Gold chips?"

Well, no, because that would taste pretty bad and also what, are we made of money? What actually goes in them is...

Haha nope. Like I'd write the secret recipe on here. (My mom has gotten over being written about in here but literally threatened me should I put the recipe out there. So...you're just... reading a story about clams. Let that sink in, go check Facebook again, but come back when you get tired of seeing pictures of people getting wasted on boats.)

What's actually funny is that the recipe isn't even that secret, on account that most of my mother's side of the family knows it...and there's 9 billion of them. (In actuality, she's one of 9.) My grandfather, whom we call Pop was the harbor cop--

"Pop was not the harbor cop. There is no such thing as a harbor cop. He was a policeman, then became harbor master when he retired. You know, you can't just give people jobs that don't exist in your stories." This is what happens when I write in the kitchen and allow my mom access before everything is written.

So anyway, my mom's family grew up a short walk away from the harbor, and they all clammed to make money. My mom actually put herself through college by selling clams to the Three Village Inn in Stonybrook. I long for a time when a college education could be attained with shellfish.

According to my mom, her brother, Larry, the eldest of the kids, attained the first version of the recipe from one of the cooks at the Inn, and it has since been adapted to "taste much better, much better." After years of watching my mom do all the work and reaping the benefits with a fork, today I got my hands dirty (literally, they were full of clam poop) and made my first batch.

In the vain of how to lists that are, in practice, useless, but this time with pictures:

How to Make Baked Clams on A Humid Monday Morning But Without the Recipe, Sorry.

Step 1: Wake up at 11 am, chuckle to yourself at the thought of all your friends who've been at work for 2 or 3 hours already, the suckers. Remember you're broke and immediately stop laughing.

Step 2: Walk downstairs and cater to your dog's enthusiastic greeting since you're the only person you know whose dog holds a grudge against you for going away for the weekend and she's finally over it.

Step 3: Go outside to hose all the sand off the clams. Take notice of the oppressive heat and be thankful that if you had to lose all your hair, you lost it in the summer. Bring the clams inside and bask in the air conditioning. But not too long, you lazy slug.

Step 4: Get a big roasting pan. Like, a big ass roasting pan, and fill it with some water and stick it on the stove. Put as many clams in there as you can without overflowing the pan, turn up the heat, and stick a cover on it.

Step 5: Suddenly realize with horror that at this very moment, depending on the temperature of the water, that for all of those clams, this is it. They are dying before your very eyes. Let the horror wain when you remember they are shellfish. But then panic for a sec as you remember the lyrics to "Colors of the Wind."

Step 6: Shrug and make a cup of coffee.

Step 7: Wait for the steam to pry the clams open for you. They should open all of the way, like so:

Step 8: If you didn't feel like "murderer" worked for you, try "home wrecker" on for size, since you will literally be tearing the clam's house in half with the flick of the wrist. Then pry the soft body of the clam out of the shell with reckless abandon.

Step 9: Clean and wash the shells, arrange them on trays so that similar sized ones are grouped together, but ONLY put them on a tablecloth you got from Marshall's the other day.

Step 10: Now you will be squeezing the contents of the clam's stomach out of it. That sentence alone should warn you that it's disgusting, but if you're not quite convinced, please check out probably the only video I'll ever put on youtube:

Step 10: Pick a side of the argument: "It's just vegetative matter" versus "BLECH."

Step 11: Get the same kind of gross satisfaction from squeezing the clams as you might a pimple, if um, you're into that because I'm tooooootally not. Nope. Not me.

Step 12: Chop up the clams in a food processor while wearing a green polo shirt.

This next part gets a little confusing because, well, I'm not going to tell you what to put in them, so...

Step 13: Mush up all the ____ and the ____ and a dash of ___ with your hands. Lose feeling in a few fingers from the numbing chill of the mixture. Assume this is atonement for sending 93 souls to their graves in a vat of boiling liquid.

Step 14: Use your sniffer to make sure the mixture is correct, then load up a test clam, because you have to make sure they are perfect or else this will all have been in absolute vain.

Step 15: Set your oven to 350 degrees and pop that sucker in there. Wait until it's brown and bubbly, then take it out and scald your mouth because your newfound patience doesn't extend to food that you want to eat.

Step 16: Share it with someone you love. Show them by your generous example that it's wrong to be a bitch for no reason, unless of course that someone is, in fact, a female dog. In that case, give her a bite just to ensure that she really isn't mad anymore.