Pantries and Clam Sauce

March 11, 2018May 31, 2019 by M+N In Construction, Design, Field 1602 1 Comment

Growing up Catholic in the 60’s and 70’s we had fish on Fridays.  Mom’s family was Irish Catholic.  Family lore (via mom) was that her elegant mother, another Marion, often had a cook, Irish immigrants always called Nora. Neither Marion seem to have collected many cooking skills from those Noras.

My mother worked full time, unusual in that time and place.  She was an RN, the administrator of a large nursing home complex (when we were sick, we would sometimes go to work with her, lolling in an empty bed, ice cream on whine). As a wife of that time she also expected to run the household without outside help: hot meals, shopping, cleaning, laundry for our family of six.

Our dinner rotation was set: Mondays roast beef (from the chest freezer portioned from sides of beef purchased as an economy), frozen small white potatoes, Green Giant vegetables with sauce, Tuesday oven baked chicken, instant mashed potatoes, frozen Green Giant vegetables with sauce, and so on until Fish Friday.

Mom, like many of her generation, embraced the myriad of new convenience frozen options. Every vegetable available in a cooking pouch with cheese or cream sauce, fish portions, and cooking ingredients, frozen chopped onions and peppers (as a vegetarian teenager learning to cook, I was surprised to discover real onions, garlic and peppers).

So I wouldn’t have described my mother as a good cook, and took over some of the family cooking as a tween (to help while she worked and to vary the menu).  Yet, a few of her recipes and standbys are my family’s  favorites.  They include a mystery of a great tomato sauce and meatballs coming from Grandma’s Irish Nora’s.  Chocolate Roll via Paris and Dione Lucas.  Fish Fridays so often redeemed with Spaghetti and Clam Sauce.

1602 Eco Drive’s compact kitchen is designed to allow for three large windows on the sink wall.  The elevation below shows that wall, the column fridge, and one side of the pantry.  The pantry is the storage piece deresistance.

 

Here’s the ‘vision’ for the sink wall.  Ward Design Group transformed my detailed hand drawings and vision pictures into seven elevation sets for the kitchen, pantry and mudroom.

 

The pantry will look similar to the featured post photo (from this blog) Counter space for all the appliances, shelf space for the china (grandmother Marion’s, Mike’s mother’s, our several sets).  Drawers and shelves for the food supplies and cooking gear that now fills dozens of basement shelves.

The pantry meal that has sustained our family for 30 years – Spaghetti and Clam Sauce – is truly one of our comfort foods.  To that end, we always have cans of chopped clams and olive oil.

Spaghetti and Clam Sauce

3 cans 6.5 oz chopped clams

1/3 -1/2 cup good Olive oil

Garlic 8-12 cloves finely minced

red pepper

parsley, oregano, basil as desired

1# spaghetti

Start a large pot of water to boil with enough salt to taste like the ocean.  Open the three cans of clams.

Place minced garlic and olive oil in large saute pan  over medium high heat.  Just before the  garlic begins to brown add a pinch or so of red pepper flakes to oil, a few seconds later add in juice from the 3 cans of clams to stop the garlic from burning.  Bring broth to a low boil and turn off.

Cook Spaghetti.  Just before pasta is al dente,  turn pot with clam broth back on and add reserved chopped clams, and Parsley, Oregano and/or Basil if using.  Reserve a cup or so of pasta water.  Drain pasta and add pasta to clam sauce along with a half cup or so of  pasta water.

Serve with peas (frozen Green Giant!) or edamame as your green vegetable