by Deb Powers

Growing up on the New England coast, you learn a lot of interesting skills. How to batten down the house for a Nor'easter in 15 minutes flat. The best place to build a sand castle so the tide doesn't wash it away. How deep to dig to find the best mussels and which rocks collect the most colorful periwinkles. One of the best skills you learn though, is how to cook on the beach.

There is nothing in this world like a real New England style clambake. It's a project that requires a couple of burly helpers, a whole passel of kids and a long, lazy afternoon on the beach.

This is no namby pamby picnic. A real New England Clambake requires muscle, shovels and a bunch of non-squeamish kids to help with the gathering.

Before the day:
Locate the perfect beach. The number one priority is to find one where you won't get tossed off the beach for cooking. The further out you are from major touristy beaches, the better your luck with this one. If you happen to have access to a private beach, you could be golden. Other requirements for the perfect beach:Look for a beach with lots of rocks - solid, non-porous igneous rocks about the size of your fist are best - and LOTS of seaweed. You CAN buy seaweed if you must, but you miss out on all the fun of gathering it up.

That Morning:
Load up the car with bushel baskets, laundry baskets, and buckets - anything you can find to haul rocks and seaweed in. You'll also need a couple of sturdy shovels, a good metal rake, enough firewood to get a roaring fire going for a couple of hours and a heavy tarpaulin.

Don't forget a couple of bushels of unhusked corn, several pounds of butter, a saucepan for heating the butter and a 25 pound sack of potatoes. Pack the extra kids in around the equipment or haul them along in a spare car - New England Clambakes are a social event. The more the merrier and many hands make light work school of cooking is in full effect for the day.

On your way to the beach:
Stop at the fish market and pick out your lobsters and steamers. Once upon a time, you'd skip this step and just haul in your own lobsters out of your own traps, and dig up your steamers on the beach. Unfortunately, the high incidence of red tide and other bacterial contaminations have made that a thing of the past. Opt for safety on this one, and pick up your seafood at the market.
You'll need:
1-2 lobsters per person (1.5 to 2 pounds each)
1 pound of softshell clams per person
2-3 sausages per person
1-2 ears of corn per person
1 pound of potatoes per person

Get it all packed into the car and head on over to the beach. This is where the fun starts.

At The Beach:

Get an early start - it will take several hours to really do a New England Clambake right. As soon as you arrive, break out the shovels and buckets. Hand shovels to your burliest helpers, and buckets and bushels to all the kids.

While your big husky helpers (and I'm being facetious, honest. One of my best diggers is a 5 foot tall, 100 pound little slip of a girl) are digging out your pit, head out with the kids to collect rocks. You'll need enough of those to cover the bottom of the pit that's being dug. That pit should be about 3-4 feet deep and 5-6 feet long.

The kids will be back with the rocks long before the pit is dug, that's almost guaranteed. Refresh their sunscreen and shoo them off to build a sand castle out of the way.

When the pit is finished, get the diggers and shovels out of the way, and dump in the stones. There are a few theories on the best way to do this. My own personal suggestion: think barbecue grill. Build your fire in the middle and circle the stones around it for even heating. Get your stones arranged, and light the fire.

You'll need to keep the fire burning for several hours. This is the fun time. Assign people to take shifts watching the fire and keeping it burning. Between shifts, have a volleyball game going, lounge around on the beach, go bodysurfing -- however you enjoy a long lazy day at the beach.

It will take about 4 hours to heat the stones enough to hold the heat. In the last half hour, gather up your kids and buckets again. This time, they're questing after seaweed - buckets and buckets of it. Make sure that the seaweed is well-soaked with seawater.

Using a long-handled metal rake, rake the stones out evenly across the bottom of the pit.

Now you'll have to work quickly - teamwork is great here.

Dump in a couple of buckets of seaweed and rake it out to an even depth of about 6 inches. Add a layer of washed, tightly shut clams.(Hint: Assign the first kids who complain of boredom earlier to wash the clams by sluicing them with seawater. Keeps them busy, and gets one job done early.)

Cover the clams with more seaweed, and add the live lobsters. More seaweed, a layer of sausages (foil-wrapped if you're squeamish about seaweed), a layer of seaweed, a couple of layers of potatoes (foil-wrapped again), a layer of seaweed, unhusked corn and a final thick layer of seaweed. Cover the entire thing with the tarp and anchor it down with beach rocks or tent pegs to tack it to the sand.

Let it steam for about an hour. Toward the end of the cooking time, carefully lift an edge of the canvas and poke down through the layers to check on progress. When lobsters are bright red and clams are fully open, your clambake is ready to serve. Use the rake and shovels and long-handled tongs to remove the food from the pit and lay out your feast.

When you're done, remember to leave the beach at least as clean as you found it. Pack up trash in bushels or pails to haul to the dump and send the kids out for one last scour to make sure you're not leaving anything behind.

When I was growing up, Friday nights meant fish. It was before the days of frozen fish sticks and Crispy-Fried Fish Fillets. During Lent, it meant bacalao, picked from wooden barrels in the North End of Boston. Nana's bacalao took days of preparation - most of it spent soaking the dried salt cod in pan after pan after pan of fresh, cold water. The rest of the year, though, she opted for something far simpler - tuna casserole, Nana style. It was one of everyone's favorite meals. It was delicious hot from the oven, and even better reheated the next day for lunch - if any managed to survive the night. It's a quick and easy meal that uses foods that you probably have on hand in your cabinets. Here's the classic Nana recipe - but don't go away after you read it.

Nana's Tuna Casserole
1 lb elbow macaroni, cooked to package directions
2 cans solid albacore tuna, packed in water
1 can green peas
1 can cream of mushroom soup
1/2 cup crushed cornflakes or Ritz crackers

Dump tuna fish into a 9" x 14" deep casserole dish. Break up well with a fork. Drains can of peas and add peas. Add can of soup, mix gently, adding a little milk if needed. Add drained macaroni, still hot. Mix well, using a wooden spoon to stir, and then pat macaroni mixture in pan. Sprinkle top with crushed cornflakes or crackers, covering well. Cover with foil and back at 350 degrees for 20 minutes. Remove foil and bake for another 5 minutes. Allow to cool slightly before serving.

To heat leftovers for lunch the next day: Moisten with milk and heat on stove over low heat.

Nana's tuna casserole has always been a big favorite with my kids, too, but with the increasing consciousness of healthy eating, I've made a few changes to it to make it a bit less heavy and a lot more nutritious. The kids love it even more, and the changes make it a more 'adult' meal, made with fresh ingredients and healthier alternatives to the high sodium canned peas and low-in-nutrition pasta.

Nana's Updated Tuna Casserole
1 cup mushrooms, chopped in coarse pieces
1/4 cup chopped onions
1/8 cup minced parsley
1 clove minced garlic
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 tbs flour
1 cup 1% milk

2 cans chunk light tuna in water
1 cup frozen peas (or fresh, shelled and cooked)
1 pound whole grain pasta, cooked to package directions
1/2 cup crushed whole grain cereal

Toss mushrooms with flour to coat and set aside. Sauté' onions and garlic in olive oil, adding parsley after onions are translucent. Add mushrooms all at once, and continue stirring gently until they're cooked through. Add milk slowly, stirring constantly to avoid lumps. Continue to cook over low heat until soup is thick and creamy.

Pour warm, cooked pasta into 11" x 14" casserole pan and spread flat. Add frozen peas, and mix well. Pour mushroom soup mixture over pasta and peas and stir gently till mixed. Pat lightly with back of spoon to smooth in pan, and then cover with whole grain cereal.

Bake covered at 350 degrees for 15-20 minutes. Uncover and cook five minutes more. Serve with a fresh spinach and mandarin orange salad.

This is still a favorite Friday night dinner in our family. It reheats beautifully the next day for lunch or dinner. A quick note on preparation - be sure that you use high quality whole wheat pasta. The processing for white flour mills out most of the nutritional value of the wheat. Whole wheat pasta, on the other hand, adds essential nutrients to your diet, packing the carbohydrate calories with nutrition. Likewise, DO use frozen or fresh peas. Not only is the color fresher, but the nutritional value is higher, since the vitamins aren't leached out into the water. This still isn't a meal that will fit into your 'low-carb' diet plan, but it provides plenty of excellent nutrition for a growing family.

Back when I was first married, there was only one place to be on Wednesday nights in Worcester. It was at a little pub called Suney's down on Chandler Street. Most of the week, they were your standard neighborhood bar - the kind where everybody knows you name. They served food, but mostly, it was the kind of place where the guys hung out at the bar. On Wednesday nights, though, the place was standing room only, with a line halfway down the block waiting for tables. And once you got in and found a place, it was usually at a table with six other people you didn't know. It didn't matter, though. No one went to Suney's for the atmosphere. Oh, no -- we were there for the fish & chips.

Now, the thing you've gotta understand about New England is - we love our fish and chips. With the ocean right here, we get the best. Even inland here in Worcester, we know what good seafood is - we've got some of the best seafood restaurants around. Here in Worcester, fish and chips means haddock. Thick slabs of it, coated in crispy, crunchy, golden brown batter and fried so fast it never even gets a chance to spatter. Almost every restaurant and sandwich shop in town does fish and chips on Friday nights, and every one of them has their own batter recipe and their own style.

The fish and chips at Suney's was something special though. It wasn't just because it was all you can eat for a ridiculously low price, though that certainly made it even more tempting. It was the fish - every slab of it was at least an inch thick and a good foot long. It was crispy gold that crunched when you bit into the batter, and gave way to the sweetest, melt-in-your-mouth flaky haddock you'd ever tasted. It was backed up by thick, steak cut fries with the peels still on them, and crunchy spicy-sweet coleslaw that made your mouth cry for the contrast between the cool bite and the sizzling hot fried fish.

No one ever had just one helping of Suney's fish and chips. That first plate came with two enormous haddock fillets, dipped and fried and laid out on a bed of french fries and cole slaw. You'd no sooner polish off that fish than one of the girls would be laying another beautiful, sizzling piece of fish on your plate. Every few minutes, they'd bring by another basket of fries and a huge bowl of slaw, and everyone dug in.

It was a social ritual as well. There were people you only saw on Wednesday night at Suney's, but you saw them EVERY Wednesday night. You might not ever know their names, but you knew them - the redheaded gent who told raunchy jokes, the family with three kids who always sat at the end of the table.. they were part of the scenery and ritual.

Those three kids have finished college by now. At some point along the line, Suney's changed hands. The new owners decided that Wednesday Fish & Chips wasn't profitable enough, and a tradition died. But run into anyone who lived in Worcester in the early 80s and mention Suney's, and I guarantee you that they'll respond with, "Fish and chips!"

The secret to perfect fish and chips is two-fold - a good beer batter, and cooking oil at just the right temperature. This recipe isn't quite Suney's, but it's so close you'd swear you were sitting in that little corner bar, setting back and tucking in.

Not-Suney's Fish & Chips
For the chips:
1 gallon vegetable oil
4-6 large potatoes
salt

Batter:
2 cups flour
Tbs baking powder
Dash cayenne pepper
Tsp salt
1 bottle cold dark beer

6 1/4 pound haddock fillets

Heat oil in deep fryer or Dutch oven to 325 degrees. While oil is heating, slice potatoes, leaving the skin on, and drop into bowl of cold water to keep from browning.

Mix together flour, baking powder, pepper and salt in large bowl. Add bottle of beer and stir till batter is smooth. Refrigerate for at least 15 minutes.

When oil reaches 320 degrees, pat potatoes dry and fry a few at a time till soft - 2 to 3 minutes. Remove from oil. Increase temperature of oil to 375 degrees, and add potatoes, cooking till browned. Remove from oil to drain.

Lower oil temperature to 350 degrees. Dredge each haddock fillet in cornstarch, dip in batter and turn to coat. Slip into hot oil. When batter has set, turn fish in oil and cook till batter is golden brown, about 2-3 minutes. Remove from oil and drain on paper toweling or bakers' rack. Serve with fries and cole slaw.

Have you ever wondered who was the first human to look at a lobster and say, "I wonder if you could eat that thing?" Not only that, but have you ever wondered who was the first person who actually look the first bite? The world may never know, but today we are grateful to our adventurous ancestors who took that leap of faith and decided to make a meal out of a less-than-attractive crustacean.

Lobster was not always the delicacy it is today. In the early days of our country, lobster was considered one of the lowest forms of seafood, and it was plentiful, so it was fed to slaves. Free men wouldn't stoop to eat lobster.

Over the years, somewhere along the way, this changed; and aren't we glad? Lobsters are now one of the most popular types of seafood with restaurants all over the country bearing their name and serving them to happy diners. Even in regions that are far from any hint of salty ocean air, such as Colorado, Kansas, and Wyoming, seafood restaurants abound.

Lobster caught fresh in the cold Atlantic waters off the coast of New England and Alaska are promptly put on ice and shipped live to locations all over the world. Tiny establishments that are little more than huts, dot the coast of Maine, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Massachusetts, with large signs promising fresh shipment anywhere on the planet.

The key to keeping lobster fresh when they arrives in the Midwest or anywhere else they might be sent is to keep them alive. Lobsters can live outside water for several hours, and sometimes days at a time. Their claws are banded, so they won't tear one another limb from limb, and they are packed in large icy crates. When mealtime arrives, a live lobster is dropped into a pot of boiling water where it dies immediately and cooks in no time. When alive, most lobsters are black or dark brown, but when cooked, the shell of a lobster turns bright red. This is how the chef knows the lobster is ready to be eaten.

The lobster is then placed on a platter with many other yummy treats including French fries, cole slaw, hush puppies, and of course a small pot of melted butter. Diners' mouths water as they are handed a set of lobster claw breakers, a plastic bib to protect their clothing, and a small tub in which to place the used shell. Then the fun begins! Eating lobster is a messy business, but someone has to do it. As we smell the aroma and taste that perfect, unique taste of lobster, we can silently salute that brave soul who, all those years ago, took the first bite.

Your mother always told you to eat your fruits of vegetables, but did she ever put the bug in your ear about seafood? I grew up in a house where fish was never served-- even on Christmas Eve, we never even partook in the feast of the seven fishes (and we're an Italian Catholic family).

That said, recent medical research clearly indicates that we should all be adding some seafood to our diet. Fish contains important omega 3 fatty acids, which help to combat heart disease and lower cholesterol. In addition, fish is a low fat protein source.

Some types of fish are better for you than others. Breaded fish sticks from your supermarket's frozen food aisle really isn't the kind of fish I'm talking about. A fried fish sandwich from the fast food drive through isn't either.

You should try to east fish that contains the highest amounts of omega 3 fatty acids. Tuna, salmon, and mackerel are three of the best types of fish you can eat. Other types of fish, such as tilefish, shark meat and swordfish, may contain mercury contamination and should be avoided if you are pregnant or nursing. Young children should avoid these types of fish as well.

Still, most kinds of fish are more than safe-- in fact fish in general is very healthful, so if you and your family are not already in the habit of eating several servings of fish per week, then you need to start now. I admit it may take some getting used to, but after a few tries you will find fish to be a delicious part of your dining repertoire.

Still need some convincing? Think your kids will never go for it in a million years? Well then here are some ways to sneak fish into your family's diet:

-- Try the canned food aisle. If you're not ready to brave the seafood market, start out by eating canned albacore tuna or salmon. You can find these products in your supermarket's canned food aisle. You can also buy both tuna and salmon packed in a pouch. New products on the market include lemon pepper or smoked tuna and smoked salmon, which have a delicious flavor that really disguises the "fishy" smell. Now here's the key part--- don't buy a can of tuna and then go home and drown it in mayonnaise for a tuna salad. The high fat mayonnaise will turn a healthy serving of fish into a high fat disaster. Instead, try sprinkling the tuna (or salmon) on a bed of salad greens and add some tomato, onion and a splash of olive oil and lemon. It may take some getting used to, but I promise you-- you will get used to it. This makes for a healthy low fat lunch.

-- Cover it in sauce. If you're trying to sneak a fish dinner past your kids, try covering it with a light sauce-- your kids may be fooled into thinking they're eating chicken or some other unidentifiable meat. Don't defeat the purpose of eating fish by smothering it in a high fat cream sauce, but instead prepare a light curry or lemon sauce. Yu can also try making a fish parmesan by covering baked fish with tomato sauce and topping it with a small amount of mozzarella or parmesan cheese.

-- Make a sandwich. If you're a whiz on the barbecue grill, grill some fish and serve it on a roll with a piece of cheese and some lettuce and tomatoes. Or make a tuna melt, which is basically just a grilled cheese sandwich with a scoop of tuna added (I also like tomatoes on mine). Try to come up with some creative fish sandwich ideas to give your kids some fun new ways to eat fish.

-- Add fish to stews, casseroles and pasta dishes. The back label of that pouch of salmon I told you about earlier has a delicious recipe for smoked salmon with fettuccini. Try to find yourself a great tuna casserole recipe (you can hide a lot if you top it with bread crumbs). Search online for a good fish stew recipe and cook with lemon and garlic to overpower the fish taste.

-- Start them young. With the exceptions of fish that contain high levels of mercury, you should make fish a part of your family's diet early on. It is not unusual for people in other countries to eat a diet mostly of fish and vegetables. Try to adapt this concept to your own family and you'll all be healthier.