Baked clams a la Dat

This is my dad's famous baked clam recipe. It equals summer for me.

50 littleneck clams (whatever is the smallest size)
1/3 cup fresh parsley, finely chopped (parsley flakes are OK, but fresh is best)
5 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 level teaspoon celery seed
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
3/4 c. olive oil (extra virgin is not necessary, just use good quality olive oil)
Frank's Red Hot hot sauce
good crusty bread

1. Soak the clams in salted room-temperature water for several hours to clean themselves out. You may have to change the water several times; the clams tend to disgorge lots of sand.
2. While the clams are cleaning themselves out, mix up the sauce. Combine the parsley, garlic, celery seed, cloves, and olive oil. Set the sauce aside for several hours to allow the flavors to combine.
3. When the clams are sufficiently clean, drain the water, rinse them off one more time, and pat them dry with a clean tea towel. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
4. Put the clams in a single layer in a high-sided baking dish. Pour the sauce over the clams.
5. Bake the clams until they are all open and the sauce has reduced. This could take anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes. The clams are particularly good after they've been broiled a bit to crisp the tops up. When the clams are all open, turn on the broiler and give the clams 2-3 minutes under the broiler. Just be careful not to burn them (if the garlic burns, they're garbage).
6. Serve the clams with warm, crusty bread and Frank's Red Hot.

Notes: Be careful when eating the clams immediately out of the oven; the shells get super hot. I have burned my fingers and mouth many times on hot clam shells. We dip the bread into the clam juice and I joke that the clams are an excuse to eat disgustingly large hunks of bread. You can also use this recipe for linguine and clams: Add 3/4 cup of white wine to the sauce and allow the clams to steam on the stove.

Everything should taste like bacon, huh?

On my the recommendations of Furiousball at We Should be GM's and my pal Pete, I bought some of this:

BACON SALT.

It finally arrived last night, so for dinner I made myself a salad of romaine hearts, grape tomatoes, cucumbers and blue cheese, and dressed it with bordeaux vinegar, extra virgin olive oil, cracked black pepper and a generous sprinkling of Bacon Salt.

Initial reaction: Meh.

It had a savory character reminiscent of Lawry's Seasoning Salt, which as a kid I loved, but I just didn't get that WHAM hit of bacon I was promised. I'll give it another try tonight on creamy scrambled eggs with toast.

Mr. Yuck

Someone had a bad day on the hill yesterday.

Cole had a magnificent 15-K complete game ON MY BIRTHDAY (Best. Gift. EVAR.), and as I followed the box score online yesterday, I hoped he'd maintain that momentum going into yesterday's game (and pull out a win for Shan and Mario, who were at the CBP yesterday afternoon). Unfortunately, he only went 5 1/3 innings and gave up four runs before getting the hook.

I know that young pitchers run hot and cold, but a little consistency couldn't hurt, please?

It's OK, baby, I still love you. Even if our love is a curse.

What is going ON here?!

misshapestubbies2
Originally uploaded by clareperretta.

Greg K dyed his hair red!

Oh, and also, THE MISSHAPES ARE IN A PHOTO WITH THE TELETUBBIES. THE APOCALYPSE IS NIGH!

RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!

Paging Dr. Jung

I had a horrible dream last night:

I dreamed I was on a factory floor. Now that I think about it it might have been the Mauna Loa Macadamia Nut factory I visited last week. The only thing the factory did was yank out people's teeth and take out their tonsils. It was just row upon row of people having their teeth removed and their tonsils taken out, screaming and wailing and crying.

And the two dentists yanking my molars out against my will? Craig (of Craig and Cara fame) and Rhett Miller.

WTF?

I get why Rhett Miller woud be there (lately I've been a bit obsessed with him and the Old 97s), but Craig? Why? He and Cara are lovely people to get drunk on a beach in Honolulu with. He is a carpenter, though, and he does have the tools to pull teeth.

Losing one's teeth is a classic anxiety dream, and dreaming about factories is supposed to represent monotony, but I just got back from vacation: What do I have to be anxious or feel stuck in a rut about?

This post also represents another opportunity to run a photo of Rhett Miller. Ha ha!

Gastric bypass ain't nothin' to f*ck wit

Ha ha, fat people are easy to make fun of! They're slow and they're big, easy targets! Ha ha! Aren't I just a card, with my clever jokes about Charlie Weis' gastric bypass lawsuit?

I have to be serious here for a moment. The truth is that gastric bypass is not just kind of a big deal, it's a HUGE deal. It's really, really serious surgery, and you have to be at an absolute nadir (or zenith, if you want to think about it another way) to even contemplate having it.

My dad had gastric bypass a few years ago. He looks and feels great now. He lost a lot of weight with relatively few side effects but I know people who've had it done who've had life-threatening sepsis, become addicted to painkillers afterward, or people for whom the surgery just didn't work. About six months after his surgery, he told me that when he was in the hospital, the night after his surgery, he was lying in bed thinking, "What the hell have I gotten myself into?" My dad spent four days in the hospital; I'm shocked that Weis would even consider sneaking in and out of the hospital for his procedure.

My dad will maintain a healthy weight for the rest of his life--which he's probably lengthened by about 25-30 years--but there are a shitload of drawbacks, too. The pre-op testing was intense: All kinds of scans, examinations, tests, even psychological evaluations. It was a full year between his first appointment with his surgeon and the actual day of surgery. He has to take handful of pills every morning to make up for the nutritional deficiencies caused by the rejiggering of his plumbing. He can't tolerate certain foods anymore. And on a superficial note, he looks kind of like a shar-pei puppy now.

But he and the rest of my family are happy--no, ecstatic--with the results. As much of a pain in the ass as he is, I'm glad he'll be around a lot longer to torment me.

It really pisses me off that fat people are the last bastion of scorn in this country. You can't make fun of, say, black people or Jews or the gays, without Jesse Jackson getting all up in your biz, but if you're fat, it's open season. Well, it's not cool or funny, and we're tired of hearing it. Of all the things you could make fun of Charlie Weis for--bad haircut, pleated khakis, his degree from Notre Dame is in DRAMA, for God's sake--the fact that he's fat should be the last thing on that list.

Aloha oe; farewell to thee, mainland

I know a lot of you come over from Deadspin and Gawker in general to read my self-indulgent little blog, and I haven't updated for some time. I'm trying to remedy that, but I haven't really had anything exciting to write about since I saw that photo of Antonio Bryant's tuchis. (Was that really almost four months ago?)

Now that Valentine's Day has mercifully ended, everyone in my immediate family can breathe a sigh of relief and look forward to vacations--for my parents, a trip to Myrtle Beach, and for me, only three weeks until I visit H-bomb and Kyle in beautiful, sunny Hawaii! So very excited. Ten days of sun, black sand, orchids and fruity, twee drinks full of rum.

This was the scene in Hilo earlier this week.

DowntownHiloMaunaKea
Originally uploaded by richardsullivan.

And here's a shot from my bedroom before I left work this morning.




Sad, isn't it? You can see why I'm so excited to get the hell out of dodge.

Now I want to solicit the Gawker brain trust for their advice: I need ideas for what to do in Hawaii. Big Island in particular. I've got a AAA book (too like my dad), and I've perused Lonely Planet (too crunchy). What's fun? What's overrated? Kyle kindly offered to come to Oahu to escort me back to the Big Island, but he's not too interested in some of the touristy things on Honolulu. I am not spending 14 hours on a plane NOT to go to Pearl Harbor and the USS Arizona.

So comment away with recommendations for things to do, places to visit, places to eat and drink, and anything else you think I need to know.

(And thanks for reading!)