I scream

When we were house hunting for our first home, the realtor took me to scores of houses, countless open house buffets and far too many McMansion showcases. But one hot day, discouraged, she showed us the way to Theno’s Dairy. Theno’s is an old, independent dairy, a holdover from Redmond’s rural days, complete with the fiberglass cow out front (she used to be on the roof, but now is wheeled indoors at night, the victim of one too many senior pranks). Their milk still comes in glass bottles, and their ice cream, Vivian’s Pride, is the best ice cream I have ever had. Hands down. Over the years, we became such familiar faces that the owners, Sandy and the gruff bearded Leroy, knew to look for Darling Husband’s favorite flavor when he walked in the door. Sandy would often have a half gallon of banana nut set aside in the corner of the deep freeze just for him. (There was a terrible dry spell when she couldn’t get bananas for a month and he had to make due with Marion berry cheesecake swirl.) They have seen us progress from newlyweds to parents; from yuppies to forty-somethings. We have watched them age as well, mourned Leroy’s premature passing, and seen their kids grow to take over the business.

A few years ago, Number One Son’s then first grade class went strawberry picking down the road at the South 47 Farm. Chatting with the teacher at the farm stand, we decided that there were more than enough berries to share with the whole school, and that ice cream would be the perfect accompaniment. The lucky souls in my carpool were subjected to a visit to the fiberglass bovine, where the kids slurped on mint chocolate chip and Mackinac Island cones while Leroy took our order for a three-gallon container of vanilla. “Since it’s for your school” he said, “I’ll give you the wholesale price.”

I received the seasonal phone call from school yesterday: would I be able to procure ice cream for the now traditional end-of-school ice cream social? When I told the boys and they had finished their rather loud happy dance, Number One Son asked timidly if we could go to the trendy new place in the mall. You know, the latest national chain that hires uniformed teens to recite scripted dialogue and smash candy into ice cream? No way, said I, we’re going to Theno’s.

You see, we started going there because the ice cream was incredibly good. We keep coming back because the ice cream was incredibly good and the people are friendly. We like it there: we love the rural setting, the fiberglass cow and the plethora of cow kitsch. We kept coming back long before we were principled to patronize our local businesses over national big box retailers, before we looked to the seasons to dictate our diet. And yet their cheesy reader board counts down the days until their refreshing cantaloupe ice cream arrives every year (around July first, depending on the weather). The pumpkin ice cream (think pie in a cone) comes from organic pumpkins you can see growing across the street.

We headed there yesterday after school, before the highschoolers descended. The cow has a fresh coat of paint (her udder sports a fetching color of pink this year). It is a sure sign of spring, catching up with Sandy and all the news, slurping up midnite chocolate, and ordering two three-gallon tubs for the end of school. The reader board reminds us that “ice cream is brain food: the more you eat, the smarter we think you are,” but it will change soon to the annual “congrats, RHS grads!” followed by the cantaloupe countdown, as it has every year. Now why would anyone want to go anywhere else?

Memorial day

I was prepared to make clam chowder yesterday. I had assembled ingredients and read up on dealing with fresh clams. I had picked up some lovely local red potatoes and made a fresh batch of soy milk. I was unprepared, however, for my emotional response to killing sentient beings, even though I knew from the onset that they were destined for my table.

Michael Pollan deals with this issue briefly in The Omnivore's Dilemma as he spends a week on a chicken ranch, but never resolves it entirely, instead becoming inured by the repetitive nature of the task at hand. But the act of taking a life to sustain our own (rather than leaving it to someone else) embodies the sentiment expressed by chef Greg Atkinson, who admonishes us to be be present to be able to be genuinely connected to life.

Standing at the outside sink, I take mucky native littlenecks from their bucket of seawater and scrub the sand and seaweed off. And at the moment I put that clean clam into the pot with some onion and celery ends, it goes from being a fine example of Puget Sound fauna to being our supper.


Joy of Cooking (the new 75th Anniversary edition, which restores much of the charm lost in the last update) did give me the option of hulling the clams raw; I chose the cowardly method, putting them in a covered pot on the stove and letting steam do the dirty work. In truth, I wanted to use this method because I knew it would provide me with excellent stock for the chowder, but I was not entirely oblivious to the psychological benefit.

Since I had orchestra rehearsal last night, I left cleaning the geoducks to Darling Husband. As I was leaving, he was placing a call to his fishing Sensei to come help him. He tells me that Sensei dropped by, giving him and both our sons a lesson in not only cleaning the beast, but in thanking it for contributing to our meal and respecting its life by not wasting anything. Indeed, before he plunged the knife into each geoduck's mantle, he said a solemn "thank you." We thanked him with a bowl of the chowder (which he pronounced excellent), for the opportunity to learn this lesson.

Clam karma

When I was a young girl, my father would scour the Saturday morning edition of the Redding Record-Searchlight (aka the Wretched Flashlight) for the weekend’s happenings. Since Redding was a small town at the time, there was usually only one thing happening, and sometimes nothing other than a 4-H meeting. As the town and we grew, we occasionally had choices, but oftentimes there was still nothing to do, and Daddy had to fabricate outings. We traipsed around stamp mills in old gold mines (updating our tetanus shots as needed), went shooting at beer cans, and sledded down Eskimo Hill on big truck inner tubes.

It appears my Darling Husband has begun channeling my father’s spirit, for last week he announced we were going clamming. Bear in mind that this is the same man who grew up in a land-locked region, one where fish is something square and breaded and acquiring it requires no more than reaching into a freezer case. When I met him, he announced he didn’t like fish, something incomprehensible to a girl weaned on cracked Dungeness crab and abalone (something my children will likely never taste, sigh). And as Darling as my Husband is, he is much more likely to be found on a dance floor than by a campfire (though he is warming to the latter). Let’s face it; I did not marry an outdoorsy guy.

So, with a low tide and a wet weather front approaching, we packed the back of the Volvo full to brimming: buckets, shovels, rubber boots, gloves, change of clothes (oops, forgot the garbage bags for the wet ones), and then tucked in a thermos of hot tea and the camp stove for a hot supper on the beach. We figured this was either going to be a fun time in spite of the weather, or another debacle/adventure to tell our grandkids.

We swung by Fred Meyer to get our permits (I honestly never thought I’d be buying a permit from the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife), then by the school to pick up Number One Son’s forgotten rain jacket. On the way to the freeway, the karma kicked in: the railroad crossing gates closed in front of us, and we got to wave to the Spirit of Washington Dinner Train passengers.

We had decided on a leisurely trip south, since the tide wasn’t out until 4:16 p.m., so we stopped for lunch at IKEA and again just past Olympia to pick up a letterbox. The rain held off until we were within striking distance of Frye Cove, our clamming destination. Darling Husband’s co-workers were already on the beach and gleefully took us in hand. In no time, Number One Son was filling his bucket, and even Little One had managed to pick up a few, getting magnificently wet and muddy in mere minutes (the torrential rain helped).

We watched a motivated soul dig up a horse clam (they’re fast, something I did not know). And then came a seriously equipped clammer, with the telltale oversized tube: the bearded native, in search of the geoduck. It took him nearly half an hour (his dog helped dig), but this fellow dug out a 3 pound beauty—and that’s all he took, since it will yield him more than two meals. After two hours on the beach, we had a few dozen clams, well under the limit, but also three small geoducks of our own. We fired up the camp stove on the tailgate and shared beef stew and a crusty loaf with our fellow muddy clammers, then packed up for the trek home to get our tired little bunnies to bed. In a true Northwest moment, the rain finally stopped and the sun broke through just as we drove away from the park.

At home, as we carried armloads of sandy clothes from the car, I noted that the trip meter read just 85 miles. It is rare that we are so connected with our food, and I am motivated to give a good part of my afternoon to making clam chowder—from scratch! The shellfish are lounging in a bucket of seawater on our back porch, spitting out their sand and awaiting steaming. If it were later in the year, I would pull potatoes and celery from our own garden, but I will have to pick up some waxy red-skinned potatoes and a green stalk from the co-op. I will, however pick a few of my baby lettuce leaves to mix in with the offerings from the Rent’s Due Ranch in Carnation.

Darling Husband may have avoided digging in the sand, but he will be learning to clean geoducks this evening. And while I don’t anticipate buying any other Fish & Wildlife permits anytime soon, I do note that my license also allows me to gather seaweed, and that the boys are allowed to fish through April of next year. I can only wonder what adventures my father and husband are planning next.