Molto Mario

This weekend we decided to keep going with Mario's recipes, so this time we tried Spaghetti with Clams, Mussels, and Peppers, Spaghetti con Cozze e Vongole. It's somewhat similar to the Linguine and Clams dish we often have as one of our "emergency meals" because it's pretty quick to fix. Mario's dish is a little fussier since it calls for fresh clams and mussels, which you buy still living (something I didn't know previously: you can test them by tapping on them and if they open briefly they're still alive, if they open prematurely, toss 'em out). The fussiness carries on into the dining phase since you have to open up each mollusk to fish out the meat. For the Linguine and Clam dish we use canned clams so it's a little faster to eat. But Corey liked the extra work so we might have this dish again. I think it needs some lemon, however.

Prior to making our latest Italian dish we went out on "Pudgy", what Corey calls our sailboat. Cause it's beamy (meaning wide) and not very fast :) Since Lake Hartwell is down this year, we don't have our normal "floating beach" on which to sit, tan, and read books on. So I suggested that this year we use Lake Keowee for the same purpose. The idea was to go out on the sailboat and just anchor somewhere. The lake was pretty choppy (20 mph wind gusting to 30!) so we turned back and just sat in our slip. It was pleasant enough and so I started reading Truman Capote's 1966 In Cold Blood, the book that basically started the non-fiction true crime genre. A fairly chilling account of the Kansas murders of the Clutter family by two drifters. Pretty gruesome and senseless. But the book itself is very well written. I finished it the very next day as it was hard to put down.