SILIQUA PATULA

Baby sister had read my “home alone” entry on Friday night, unheralded to me, she had a plan to cure my loneliness. She stopped by my work on Saturday afternoon. I was really happy to see her beautiful self grace my presence, because she lives in Seattle and doesn’t have the opportunity to visit with me. She came into the nursing office and said she needed to use my kitchen. I have 149 razor clams in the back of my truck, I gave her a rather perplexed glance and said you mean “we need to use my kitchen”. After work, I helped her bring the rather heavy cooler into the kitchen, opened up the lid and screamed, one of the first screams during our endeavor, the clams were still alive.They were the most ugliest, disgusting sea creatures I have ever seen. “Where on earth did you get these things”! She explained that the chairman of our Indian Tribe gave them to her. We stared at these claims wondering “what now”, how do we go about cleaning these things. Our first thought was to call a family friend who happens to know much. We didn’t like the advise he gave us. “just take off the shells, clean them, and off to the freezer”. Something just wasn’t right with his advise. Ah ha, I went up to my study and got on the internet, hit Google, typed in “razor clams” bingo! There were many web sites on how to clean these little guys with the long, thick, squirting thingie.I printed off all the pages. Sis and I read all the directions thus realizing this would be a major project we were about to partake in. I contemplated and reached for two wine glasses. We would have to have some libation before continuing with the task at hand. STEP ONE

We had fun shucking the meat from the shells by cutting the connecting muscle attachments from the back of each shell and then rip these little guys from their homes.It was just awful, like I said these guys were still alive. SUB TEXT: Now I know why they are called razor clams, these guys have razor sharp shells which are very good for cutting your fingers and drawing blood. Sis and I became blood sisters as we rubbed our fingers together and pledged we would shuck shells every year.

STEP TWO

We decided it would be faster to have an assembly line production and move this operation outside. My job was to cut out the digestive system in other words the black mushy stuff. I only had one pair of kitchen scissors, I can’t believe my audacity, I went upstairs to my scrapbooking room and took one of my specialty scissors. I used the “Victorian”. (A major no no in the scrapbooking world.) Baby sis opted for the less wrenching job of cutting off the tally wackers and splitting them in half.

STEP THREE Music! You must have music to help you whistle while you work. I put on my dish network blues music channel, opened the window from the living room so we could listen to the music outside while we played with the clams.

SIDE NOTE

While I was cutting, something”tube like” shot out into the air a good 4 feet. I shrilled out a good death defying scream in which I’m sure my neighbors thought I was being killed.

STEP FOURI performed the arduous job of cleaning all the 149 clams with the garden hose. Sis was taking an extremely long time cutting the necks aka:penis of these guys. She was extremely grossed out.

Three hours later we returned inside to vacuum pack these clams this part wasn’t so bad..Baby sis was happy to take control of this step

We never realized this process of pre paring the clams would take a total of four hours. It is now Tuesday night and I have just finished cleaning up the deck and kitchen pots and pans. WHAT A FEAT WE ACCOMPLISHED. Now about this pledge we made about doing this every year, hummmm.