Seafood Steam Part 1:The Food

Saturday we had our Seafood Steam. If you'll remember a month or so ago, Cary and I did a practice-run for this with our giant lobster steamer. We decided to steam the shrimp, corn, and potatoes, and sautee the mussels and clams this time.

We also tried a recipe for a steamed calamari salad. One large pot with a quart or so of water, a couple of fresh bay leaves, peel of 2 lemons, season water, put a colander in the water with the calamari, give a few minutes to steam, use tongs to stir it up so it doesn't get overcooked.
Cary likes his tongs:
Remove from steaming pot after 4 minutes or so, put in a platter, zest one orange on it, squeeze the juice of 2 lemons, drizzle some oive oil, and voila! Here's Cary and Christine tossing the calamari salad. It was really good, espcially considering neither of us have made anything like this before.
Isn't Christine glowing?! It might be because of the delicious Reese's Peanut Butter Cup brownies or the smoked salmon dip she made. Or maybe its something else, hmmm.....
Here are the delicious mussels and clams before being cooked and here they are after:
These were really easy to cook. Cleaning them is the most time consuming part. Then you get a deep pan, olive oil, shallots, garlic, salt and pepper, let them sautee, then pour some white wine in there and wait for it to boil. Throw the mussels in (do them seperate from the clams because they need more time to cook), turn up the stove to full whack (according to Jamie Oliver), cover it up, give it 3-4 minutes, as soon as they open their shells, take the lid off and stir them around for a minute and you're done. Really easy and plump and juicy mussels.

You'll notice the lobster steamer on the left in the picture above and below. We used that for the shrimp, potatoes, and corn. Filled the bottom chamber with 2 Buck Chuck chardonay and some onion slices, garlic cloves, sliced lemons, season the water, let it boil, drop the corn and potatos in for 20 minutes, then throw the shrimp in till they turn pink. Sprinkle with some Old Bay. Deeelicious.
Here is the final product:
It was mmm mmm good.

I forgot to take pictures of the Asian slaw with pear and avocado that Cary made. I also have no pictures of the Reese's Peanut Butter cup brownies and smoked salmon dip that Christine made. Sorry guys! Next time I will put someone on picture duty to get all of the details.

Part 2 and Part 3 will be pictures of friends that I will try to post Monday night.