Dark Days snack: Razor clams rock!

I’d like to be one of those home cooks who plans out well-rounded meals, makes intelligent shopping lists and brings it all together with ease every night of the week.

But I’m not.

Often, I find myself senselessly buying a bunch of groceries and trying to figure out what to do with i

t all later.

This happens a lot when I’m trying to come up with an interesting dish for the fourth-annual eat-local-in-winter Dark Days Challenge, which inspired me to, early on, to grab everything remotely local I could find at Seattle’s Pike Place Market.

One of my finds at the market those many weeks ago, was wild Pacific razor clams, sold under the Quinault Pride label.

I should have taken them home and made them that night, of course, but I froze them, which I’m sure can’t be good because they had already been frozen. But we do what we can, right?

I had tried razor clams only once before, years ago when my husband and I went childlessly to the Washington coast on lark.

We purchased a clam gun and a fishing license on the way.

Even though we showed up an hour late and didn’t know what we were doing, razor clamming was tremendously fun.

For me, a South Dakota girl, it was a riot. I mean, come on, “clam gun”?

In the end, we took our limit, though the ugly, ugly clams were pretty small. We brought them home, which was Olympia at the time.

I very bravely cleaned them. They are not pretty creatures. Taking my husband’s smart advice, I breaded and fried them.

They tasted great, kind of sweet and buttery and not fishy at all, my kind of shellfish.

Excited to perhaps repeat the experience, I decided to bread and fry a pound of them for a snack to go with the Seahawk’s ill-fated playoff game against the Bears.

Though we lost the game, I was pretty pleased with the razor clams, my official Week 7 meal for the Dark Days Challenge.

Though some of them were tough, not something I remembered having the first time, they had that buttery-sweet clam taste again.

I breaded them with local flour (Stone Buhr) seasoned with salt, pepper, paprika and cayenne, dipped them in a local-egg wash (Wilcox Family Farms eggs) and dredged them through non-local grocery store bread crumbs.

I fried the first batch in Golden Glen Creamery butter, but then switched to vegetable oil after they started to brown a bit too fast.

Both batches, garnished with lemon juice, tasted great and made me feel connected to the local, natural-food system.

I can’t wait to take my son, now 2, clamming when he’s a bit older.

I just checked with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and tentative digging dates and low tides in February are coming up soon.

Feb. 17, Thursday: 5:53 p.m., -0.9 feet; Twin Harbors.

Feb. 18, Friday: 6:33 p.m., -0.9 feet; Long Beach, Twin Harbors, Copalis, Mocrocks and Kalaloch.

Feb. 19, Saturday: 7:13 p.m., -0.5 feet; Long Beach, Twin Harbors, Copalis, Mocrocks and Kalaloch.

You might try it. What else do you have to do in February, right?

Note: If you decide to go razor clamming and cook them up yourself, be aware that they are pretty disgusting animals to clean.

See pictures and step-by-step instructions here, if you think I’m being a wimp.

That said, I worked through by squeamishness back in the day and I’m glad I did.

Razor clams really are a local-local treat.

(Note: Not everyone thinks razor clamming is a worthy tradition.)

If you really want to get hardcore, I hear you ought to try geoduck fishing, like one of my fellow Dark Days participants did.

Brittney Rourke of Everett and her husband, Tyler, have had some wild geoduck adventures, and they’ve made geoduck chowder — the best chowder they’re ever had.

Read about it all here.