A Clammy feast!

I'm a lucky girl. My parents came for a visit this weekend and they brought a whole cooler full of these beauties:

My dad raked all 140 of these on Friday! Fresh clams straight from Long Island. Imagine a 12 dozen clams for free - all I had to do was figure out what to do with them! Steamed clams and stuffed clams sounded perfect.

Ron separated them into steamer size and stuffed clam size. My mom and dad opened the big ones and I made the stuffing - it was quite the family affair!

I sauteed some diced shallot, red pepper, onion, and celery. After the vegetables were soft I added the chopped up clams. I chop my clams in a mini food processor and they always look really gross. I'm only posting the picture so when you make these at home (which you should) you'll know that if the clams look like gray vomit - it's okay!

See? Yuck right? After you add the gross looking clams to the softened vegetables add some bread crumbs, parsley and chives. I seasoned the mix as I went with salt, pepper and old bay.

My dad cleaned the shells to fill. These are better looking than those clam shaped foil things. I mean the clams come with their own perfect size container for this filling - use it! But I guess if you're using canned clams you can use those foil things or you can use this stuffing as a filling for stuffed shrimp or fish - that might be what I do with the leftovers!

Stuff the filling into the clams - I made two dozen. Here they are right before they baked at 350 for about 20 minutes or until the tops get brown.

These ended up being part of a feast at Ron's parents' house. Ron steamed the little guys to serve with melted butter and lemon, Ron's parents went salad crazy and made a tomato mozzarella salad, green bean salad, cucumber salad, potato salad and a tasty green salad with apricots, baby shrimp, cucumbers and a jalapeno vinaigrette. There was BBQ chicken too, although by the time it came out I was too full of salad to have any!

Peach pie with ice cream or angel food cake with berries and whip cream for dessert. Not a bad Sunday huh?

Update: I didn't post an individual picture of the steamers - you can see them in the spread above. We ate them all with butter and lemon in like 3 minutes.