Steamers!

I was in the mood for an old favorite today, and the Caveman Diet preaches to satisfy any craving you have, so I just made myself a delicious little snack.  When I was a kid a big treat for us was to go into Hoboken, NJ for a meal at the famous (and now defunct) Hoboken Clam Broth House.  Later on I was fortunate enough to live in Hoboken, and I ate there frequently.  They had a special on Tuesday nights, a pound and a half Maine lobster, fries, cole slaw, and an ice cold draft beer for $14 bucks!  But I always started with a bucket of steamers!  Steamers are little clams, also called manilla clams, but they can be made with little necks as well as many other varieties.  It's such a simple dish, but so delicious, and so fun to eat!

All the dish consists of are a bunch of steamed clams, a cup of clam broth, and a cup of drawn butter.  If you're a regular reader, you already know that on the Caveman Diet, "one of these things is not like the other!"  Funny how songs from Sesame Street still stick in your head for 40 years.  Okay, let's test your Caveman IQ, is the bad food the clams?  Well, if they're wild caught, they're fine.  In fact, they're great for you, loaded with Omega-3, which is the best fat on earth, and the key to good health.  If they're farm raised, forget it, it's loaded with bad saturated fat, and horrible for you, even though they're probably delicious, because bad saturated fat tastes yummy.  But you're not doing yourself any favors by eating farm raised fish, so don't.

Okay, back to the quiz, is it the clam broth?  Well, if you were to buy it in a store, you'd be hard pressed to find a brand that doesn't add salt, which is another no-no on the Caveman Diet.  There is already the perfect amount of salt in all the food you eat, the perfect amount to keep you alive, and if you add any extra you are literally ruining your health!  Think about salt for a second.  If you drink salt water, you throw up.  If you drink enough of it, you'll die (of dehydration, of all things!).  If you're a slug, it'll melt you!  Well, think about all of that the next time you reach for the salt shaker.  It's just not worth the high blood pressure, and once you're off salt for a while, your taste buds will come alive again and you'll taste what food should REALLY taste like (sorry to tell you this folks, but tons of your taste buds are already dead, and that's why the more salt you use, the more you want, so you can add flavor to your dead taste buds).  Anyway, I can't find any clam broth without salt, so either I'll make my own, or skip it altogether because, by nature, I'm a lazy bastard.  The only reason for the broth anyway is to rinse off any excess sand from the clam after peeling it away from the shell, so I'm just using hot water for that part.

Okay, geniuses, the answer is DRAWN BUTTER!  There are actually two schools of thought about dairy on the paleo diet.  One is, if it's organic, from grass fed cows, sheep, goats, etc, then go for it.  But the bulk of us (including myself) feel that there would almost NEVER be an opportunity for a caveman to eat dairy.  IF they happened to kill a nursing animal, then I guess they would gorge on whatever milk they found in the carcass (hungry yet with all this sexy food talk?).  But that would be pretty rare if you ask me.  Plus, there's a reason some people are lactose intolerant.  It's because we're supposed to be, it's just a fluke of nature that most of us aren't.  No other animal but humans drink another animals' milk.  It's not natural.  And the caveman diet is all about natural, so I stay away from dairy.  However, if you read my blog on french roasted chicken (look it up yourself you lazy bastards), then you also know that olive oil makes a great substitute for butter.  So that's what I did this time.  I put some olive oil in a sauce pan, added garlic, crushed red pepper flakes, cilantro, and lemon juice and warmed it up while steaming the clams.

As for the clams, I went to Whole Foods and bought a couple dozen of WILD CAUGHT manilla clams ($6 bucks a pound, not bad).  When I got home, I rinsed them off in the sink, and threw them into a big pot, with a steam basket inside (they're cheap and work great).  I put a little water in the pot, just under the bottom of the steam basket, turned the heat on medium high, and covered it.  In about 5 minutes they were done!  Take the lid off and it looks like this:

Check out that steam!  If any of the clams don't open, throw them away, it means they were probably dead before you cooked them, and they could make you VERY sick if you eat them.  Transfer them to a bowl, serve up the oil/lemon juice "mock drawn butter" mixture in a little cup, and put a cup full of hot water next to it all.  Then follow these simple instructions:

1. Pull clam meat out of shell.
2. Dip clam into hot water to rinse off any excess sand.
3. Dip clam into delicious mock drawn butter mixture.
4. Eat.
5. Repeat steps 1-4.

So simple a caveman can do it.  Ugga-Bugga!