Get Your Grill On

For those of you who enjoyed the grilled shrimp and roasted oysters that I posted last week, here is some more shellfish action for you. This dish was actually one of those “Plan B” meals that sometimes happen when things don’t go quite the way you plan.

My original intent was to cook the roasted oysters featured here at Get Your Grill On about a week ago. Since there aren’t any good seafood shops nearby, my first order of business was track down the oysters.

I did my homework and verified that I could actually get oysters, and was a little surprised when I found them at my local grocery store. When I grabbed my sack of oysters from the seafood cooler, I made the mistake of looking at the tag and saw that they had been harvested almost a month earlier. Now, I’ve always been kind of cavalier about “sell by” dates. Just last week, I put about fifteen pounds of close dated meat in the freezer. I just can’t turn down a deal. But I guess month old oysters is where I draw the line.

“No problem” I say. “We’ll just truck on over to the Fresh But Pricey Mart, they will surely have oysters.” Guess what? No oysters. I finally decide to go with a bag of Little Neck Clams, despite having never actually cooked clams before. I figured I could use the ingredients I already had and see how it turned out.

Fire Roasted Clams

Preheat a heavy cast iron skillet on a HOT grill.

While your pan is heating, run back to the kitchen and brown one or two slices of bacon in a sauce pan. When the bacon is crispy, remove it from the pan and saute a couple of chopped shallots and a couple of cloves of garlic (also chopped) in the bacon drippings.

Add a tablespoon of butter (I was afraid the bacon drippings wouldn’t have quite enough artery clogging power) and about 1/2 cup of white wine and continue to heat just until the butter is melted (we’ll cook it down later.) Crumble the bacon and add back to the saute pan.

Once your skillet is hot (and I mean HOT) add a couple dozen Little Neck clams and put the grill’s lid back on. Keep a close check and remove them (skillet and all) once all the clams are open (mine took about eight minutes.)

Add your buttery winey bacony concoction to the clams. The skillet should be hot enough to cook the sauce down, but you can help it along on the stove top if you need a little extra heat.

Serve with crusty French bread.

I think it is prudent to offer a warning about the nature of cast iron skillets that have been sitting on a hot grill for any length of time. Yes, we all know that they get hot, but I am going to emphasize it again. They get REALLY HOT. Fabric “hot handles” like this one are great for removing hot pans from the oven, but are not nearly enough if your grill is more than about six steps from the kitchen. I realized this exactly halfway between the front yard and the kitchen. Let’s say that the second half of that trip was a little less graceful than the first.