Linguine with Clam Sauce
Linguine with White Clam Sauce
This recipe can serve any purpose from a last-minute weeknight meal to a romantic dinner for 2! Very delicious and surprisingly easy to make.
Ingredients
- Extra virgin olive oil
- 8 garlic cloves, smashed
- 2 dozen cockles (fresh preferred!)
- ½ cup white wine (or whatever is left over from the bottle you opened the night before)
- ¼ cup water
- 2 servings of linguine (about 4 oz = 2 cups cooked pasta)
- 1 tablespoon butter
- ½ tablespoon lemon juice
- 1 tablespoon parsley
- 1 tablespoon oregano
- A pinch of red pepper flakes
- Ground black pepper to taste
- ½ cup parmesan cheese
Directions
- Step 1 First let the cockles sit in water (room temp) for 10 minutes, then rinse in a strainer and scrub with a brush.
- Step 2 Heat olive oil in a saute pan over medium high heat and add the garlic gloves. Cook until browned. Add the clams, white wine and water to the pan. Bring to a boil, cover and cook for about 5 minutes (or until the clams have opened), Remove the clams and reduce the cooking liquid over medium heat by half. Meanwhile heat water for the pasta in a saucepan and cook pasta. Put a drop of olive oil and salt into the pasta water.
- Step 3 Add butter to the pan with the clam cooking liquid and stir. Add back the clams (we prefer with the shells, this is personal preference), stir in lemon juice, then add parsley, oregano and red pepper. Toss with the cooked pasta. Then remove from the heat and add the black pepper and parmesan cheese.
Marc called me at work one afternoon and instead of the usual back and forth about “what should we have for dinner” he announced we were having linguine with white clam sauce. He’d already gotten the ingredients and we were ready to go. What a pleasant surprise! (On a Monday no less.) I had actually been craving pasta that day for some reason too so it was as if he had read my mind. This was something I had ordered in restaurants from time to time, but never attempted at home and now I’m kicking myself wondering why not? It’s a nice light pasta for a steamy summer night and very simple for a week night preparation.
If you can get fresh clams from your seafood counter, it’s a win-win, but a can of minced clams will also work in a pinch. We would normally use homemade pasta from our pasta maker, but someone had gifted us a lovely package of linguine which was too tempting not to use this time. I’m sure we’ll be making many more iterations of this in months to come, so stay tuned!
