June 5
Pasta with Clams—a Twist
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- Pasta with Coconut Curry Clam Sauce [View Recipe]
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Ingredients
- .5 pound pasta
- .5 tablespoon oil
- 2 tablespoons ginger (peeled and chopped)
- 3 cloves garlic
- salt
- .5 tablespoon curry paste
- 1 lemon (rinsed and patted dry)
- 14 ounces coconut milk
- 13 ounces clams (drained, reserving juice)
- cilantro (cleaned)
- mint (cleaned)
- basil (cleaned)
- 4 scallions (cleaned, trimmed)
Instructions
We start by heating a large pot of water for the pasta. In a large pan, we add the oil and ginger and place over medium heat. While the ginger begins to cook, we smash the garlic cloves with the side of our knife (carefully) and remove the peels. We sprinkle the cloves with salt and mince. We add the minced garlic to the ginger. Next we add the red curry paste and stir. Using the microplane, the zest of the lemon is added directly to the pan, and we set the lemon aside to finish the sauce. Finally, we add the well-shaken coconut milk and juice from the 2 cans of clams (though not the clams just yet). We stir well and bring to a boil. Then we lower the heat and simmer gently while we cook the pasta.
When the pot of water comes to a boil, we add the spaghetti and some salt and stir. We cook according to the package directions.
When the pasta is almost done, we chop the fresh herbs and slice the scallions on an angle. Then we add the chopped clams to the coconut curry sauce and raise the heat to medium again. We drain the pasta in the colander and put it back in the empty pot. We taste the sauce for seasoning, shut off the heat, add the juice from the reserved lemon, and pour the sauce over the spaghetti. We toss well with some of the herbs and scallions and plate each portion topped with some more.
- Italian Bread with Roasted Mushrooms
- Salad with Orange Muscat Champagne Vinegar
If not for the rain, today might have been a very nice day. It has not rained for a few days. Several people had apparently forgotten how to drive in the rain, much to their misfortune and, indirectly, ours. We sat in two traffic jams of 30 minutes while traveling to the Maryland Science Center. The baby dislikes driving in the car and detests when the car does not move. She screamed for much of the hour long journey to downtown Baltimore.
The older kids enjoyed themselves at the Science Center, but we were not able to stay long—mostly because we arrived so late. We ate lunch at a taco place near Fells Point. The kids did a fine job eating there, as they do at any Mexican/Southwestern restaurant.
The afternoon turned from a hectic, but enjoyable morning to a almost frantic search for baby toys. We were looking for one specific toy—a caterpillar that our daughter "bought" our son just after he was born. We have a picture of our son as a baby with it at the baby's age. We would very much like to get a photo of her with the same toy at nearly the same age. We did not find it today, but we did manage to do quite a bit of tidying up in the process. Fortunately, the baby slept through all of this, providing us the chance to make dinner.