Clambake at the Shore

My in-laws were nice enough to let us takeover their shore house this past weekend. So we invited some friends down, enjoyed a perfect beach day on Saturday, and topped it off with a delicious dinner with good friends. Can't beat that.

While the boys enjoyed some beers and this view.

Us girls got busy in the kitchen.

We made a one pot clambake from the August issue of Bon Appetit. It was actually a 3 pot clambake for us, because no one actually has a pot that would fit this much food. We scaled it down a little (although not enough), substituted old bay for the chile-lime seasoning and it turned out great. None of us had cooked live lobsters before, and we were a little intimidated, but there was no need, it was ridiculously easy and they were cooked perfectly. Overall it was an easy dish, with fairly little prep, and perfect for a group.

We followed this up with some bourbon soaked peaches over vanilla ice cream for dessert.

Keep reading for our slightly downsized recipe from the magazine. We could have used a little more sausage, so I'm going to add a little more to my version.



Ingredients
1 bottle white wine (we used Pinot Grigio)
2 1bs potatoes, scrubbed and cut into 1 inch pieces
3 live lobsters
8 large eggs (these are completely optional)
8 ears of corn, shucked and cut in half
4 celery stalks, cut into 1/2 inch pieces
2 lbs kielbasa, cut into 2 inch pieces
2 lemons, halved and sliced
1 orange, halved and sliced
1 head of garlic, cloves separated
1 package of thyme
50 littleneck clams
2 lbs mussels
old bay seasoning
1-2 sticks of butter, melted

Directions
If you have a pot big enough you can make this all in one pot, or you can divide it up into more like we did. We split the ingredients fairly evenly across our 3 pots.

Clean clams & mussels, discarding any with open shells as they are already dead and you don't want to eat them. We just scrubbed the clams and to clean the mussels we followed my directions in this curried mussels post.

Bring wine and 12 cups of water to boil over high heat on stove. Add potatoes, cover with lid, and cook for 5 minutes. Add lobsters and eggs (make sure to hold the lids down until the lobsters are settled and stop trying to knock them off) and cook 10 minutes. Add corn, celery, kielbasa, lemon, orange, garlic, thyme and littlenecks, and cook with lids on for 10 minutes. Add mussels, cover and cook for 5 more minutes.

Use a slotted spoon to transfer everything to a serving platter (or platters) and sprinkle generously with old bay. Add broth from pans to bowls and serve bowls of broth and melted butter along with clambake.  Now hopefully you are ready to get messy and dig in.