Heyo!
I went camping over the weekend with fast friend and now father figure Liana Li. The last few days, Liana showed me how to do a bunch of things my Dad probably should have—how to set up a tent, how to poop in the woods (close your eyes and scream), how to filter water, and how to build a fire from pine needles, pine cones, and wood.
The two of us, accompanied by my rascally cattle dog, drove four hours West and backpacked 2-3 miles into the Nordhouse Dunes, a wilderness area on the eastern shoreline of Lake Michigan. Hey, here’s something I didn’t know—camping backpacks are fucking heavy. I’m sure it didn’t help that I lugged around a grocery list full of ingredients to make linguine & clams, but if I’m going camping, I’m going camping my way—with lots of olive oil, lemons, garlic, wine, and cheese.
While looking for a campsite, a fortuitous full moon shined upon on a flat, mostly shaded area about a half a klick away from the beach. It is true that everything tastes better while camping, but especially that first meal. While I sat exhausted, Liana built a fire and boiled water for some spicy, Kang Shi Fu sweet and sour beef flavored instant ramen. I love Chinese ramen, and really any ramen that features a slick, spicy chili oil packet. Noodles of all varieties need more oil. It’s how I finish every pasta dish, and the ramen was instantly more luxurious because of it.
Day two, we spent the afternoon on the beach dining on Triscuits and Fishwife canned sardines. It should be said that while I’m a canned fish fiend, I never seek out Fishwife and its artful packaging. I like to spring for brands like Nuri Portuguese sardines or Bela (also from Portugal.) Fishwife sardines come from Spain, and the preserved lemon flavor was lovely. The lemons were mostly subdued though, and I’ve known preserved lemons to be far more salty and umami forward than this. I really would have liked that tin of sardines, though it only exists in my imagination.
Triscuits and canned sardines are a snack I picked up from Gabrielle Hamilton and her awesome memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter. More than Bourdain, Gabrielle made me want to write about food. Her story is super honest, and equal parts brutal and lovely. It’s also just a very American story about relationships, growing up in a broken home, coming of age in New York City, and the ludicrousness of the restaurant industry in the 80’s and 90’s.
The first few chapters are all about her parents’ divorce, and she talks about fending for herself alone in the house, eating things which her father had not cleaned from the cupboard, a cupboard which her French mother had always properly stocked:
“I relied on what I had seen her do and improvised from there. I ate tinned white asparagus with capers and some of their juice and olive oil and parsley from the garden. I ate canned sardines and chewed through the spines and the slivery unpleasant skin until I finally realized how to skin and filet them gently with a pairing knife, placing the meaty bodies on horribly stale Triscuit crackers with sliced shallots and mayonnaise.”
That paragraph is poetry, and it resonated greatly with me as a college student. Gabrielle put Triscuits and sardines on the menu at Prune when it first opened in 1999. Comfort food from an uncomfortable time.
Finally, on Saturday night, Liana and I made linguine & clams. I don’t know where the idea came from to make linguine & clams on a sandy, clam-less beach without a prep table or any of the proper tools. Truthfully, I often think, “OK, what’s the stupidest thing I could do here?” and then I do that. There’s something rewarding about seeing through a needlessly difficult, crazy idea. Linguine and clams doesn’t make a lick of sense on the shores of Lake Michigan, but we did it, and it was delicious and beautiful and idiotic. I giggled the entire time.
Get my professionally tested and well-reviewed linguine and clams recipe here.
The first thing I did was make the sauce: A heavy dose of California olive oil, sliced garlic, sweet onion, and crushed red pepper swirled around a 12-inch sauté pan resting on a portable, foldable camping grill. Next, I deglazed the pan with some white wine and took a few swigs myself as one does. Finally, I added the juice from three cans of clams (just the juice, read the recipe!), reducing, swirling, and smelling for a few minutes until a viscous sauce formed.
I poured the sauce into a small camping pot meant for coffee, and then filled the sauté pan back up with filtered water from the lake. Liana kept the fire roaring like a pro, and I slowly cooked 3/4 of a pound of De Cecco linguine for about 7 minutes. That’s way under al dente, but follow me here.
I dumped out all of the pasta water save for 1/2 a cup, added back the clam sauce, and cooked the linguine the rest of the way in the sauce and starchy water. The pasta absorbed and swelled with the oceanic, winey liquid.
To finish, I ripped a ton of parsley with my hands, squeezed the juice of a lemon, added the chopped clams, and then grated a rather generous amount of Pecorino Romano to stir in. We actually forgot to bring salt, so I used more Pecorino than normal to achieve the proper saltiness.
Liana asked for more olive oil on top of her pasta, and I couldn’t have jumped out of my chair faster. Liana, who is Chinese-American, knows the value of adding oil to noodles. Instant ramen and Italian pasta both benefit greatly from the addition of slick, shimmering fat. A good reminder that life is always improved by finding small luxuries where you can.
Thanks for reading! I know this newsletter is a bit all over the place, but I’ll be back next week with a restaurant report from Detroit. Yee-haw!!
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