Clams and such

On Thursday I drove over to the market in Selles-sur-Cher, about a twenty minute drive from home. There were three fish mongers, as usual. Not one of them had coques (cockles) for my linguini with white clam sauce. I did find praires, a much larger bivalve. I hesitated, both the size and the price putting me off. But, not wanting to go home empty-handed again, I gave in a bought a kilo.

The cockles are small and the praires are big.

I also looked for zucchini (a low-cal addition to Tasha's wet food). Again, not one of the several produce vendors had any. When I asked one, he said the season was over. Hmm. So I decided to stop into a nearby supermarket on my way home. Of course, they had zucchini. The also had coques! They were small, but sold for a price much lower than I expected to spend. So I got half a kilo.

The finished dish.

Ken purged the shellfish in salt water with semolina for a couple of hours before we made the sauce. He sauteed minced garlic and onion in olive oil, then added white wine and the two kinds of clams, steaming them until they opened. We added a small amount of tomato sauce (left over from pizza Wednesday), making ours a pink clam sauce. After adding the cooked linguini, we served it all with chopped parsley.

As I said before, the coques were smaller than I'm used to so there wasn't much to them. The praires were bigger, but also a little tougher than the coques. In any event, it tasted fine and we ate it all. I'll look for coques again between now and the holidays.