Woo-hoo!
In Dublin fair city where the girls are so pretty,
I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone.
As she pushed her wheelbarrow through streets broad and narrow
crying, “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive oh.”
I’m Kirk Lombard, the sea forager.
And today we’re going to go out, get some mussels, maybe get some sandy mud clams.
Maybe pick up an eel or two out here.
We’re going to try to get all that and then put it into a big chowder.
These are called California mussels.
They’re the native, coastal California mussel.
When they live in these areas where they’re just getting battered by the waves,
they cling on really really tightly.
So, it’s a little work getting them off the rocks.
You know, it’s a wild animal.
It’s tougher, it’s chewier.
Sometimes it has a little bit of grit in it, but that’s all part of the fun.
In this thick clay that’s in here are these burrowing clams.
They’re called boring clams — that doesn’t mean they’re boring.
It just means that they bore a hole.
This is great.
These soft areas, it’s way easier to get them.
Oh my god, look at that.
I never see these here.
Oh my god, no way!
Oh, that’s so amazing.
That’s a butter clam.
They have a buttery flavor, they’re really yummy.
It’s really important to always fill the holes in.
Yeah, I’m on this guy.
Ahhhh!
That’s a small gaper clam.
Just pulled him out of there.
This is the siphon.
And on one of these clams that’s the primary thing that you eat.
I’m taking the siphon of this clam, and I’m kind of prepping it a little
to make it really nice for the eel.
Just a hook on a little piece of line with a wire.
Ha ha!
Monkeyface eel.
A prickleback.
Somebody thought that looked like a monkey
because the eyes are so close together, you know?
So we’re going to have a little intertidal stew.
That’s what we’ve got going on.
Alive, alive, oh, alive, alive oh, crying, “Cockles and mussels alive, alive, oh.”
Let’s do a butter clam first.
First thing you do, just put the knife in, cut that down.
Open it up, look at that.
Ah, it’s so yummy.
Then what I’m going to do is take this little paring knife here and
cut around the inside of the shell.
The tip of the siphon is where the most of the paralytic shellfish poisoning toxins might reside.
And now this is a very tiny horse neck clam, gaper clam.
First thing you do is you cut off the tip of the siphon here.
You get rid of the snot-like, goopy stuff here.
Like this, just get rid of it.
Eckh.
And then I just split it and that’s just to get it into a steak-like form,
you see it’s like that.
Now the guts of a monkeyface eel, it’s just terrible.
A terrible smell inside the guts of a monkeyface eel.
I’m cutting him down like this and then I’m going to flip the skin like that.
Little tiny eel like this, you’re not getting a great yield on it.
And that’s like the best crab bait you could possibly have.
These are all our mussels here.
And these I’m just going to rinse off to get the sand off.
Leftover wine.
Starting to smell good.
Mm-hmm.
So here’s our monkeyface eel, make some big chunks of that.
So, we have our gaper clams, our butter clams and our monkeyface eel.
And we’ve got a few mussels ready, let’s put ‘em in
and let them open up in their sweet time.
Crying, “Cockles and mussels alive, alive, oh.”