Spaghetti and Clams

This dish is literally the only dish I will eat with clams. Frankly, clams disgust me. I don't know exactly what it is. I'd like to think it is the texture, but I love mussels so that cant be it. I grew up with my mother making this dish. The few times I have tried it before tonight; I never followed a recipe. I thought it was basically olive oil, canned clams, and minced garlic that made this dish. Boy was I surprised when I got curious enough to search for a recipe and found one with 7 ingredients.

• 1/2 lb spaghetti, cooked
• 1/4 cup butter
• 1/2 cup chopped onion
• 3 garlic cloves, minced
• 2 - 8oz cans clams, drained with juices reserved
• 1/4 cup parsley
• 2 Tbsp olive oil

Melt butter in a large skillet over medium-low heat. Stir in onion and garlic. Cook 5 minutes. Add clams and stir for 3 minutes. Add water to the reserved clam juice to make 2 cups of liquid. Stir in parsley, olive oil, and clam juice mixture. Increase heat to boil, then reduce to a simmer. Cook covered for 15 minutes. Toss with spaghetti.


I was very pleased with how this turned out. There was definitely more flavor than my old way of making this dish. This proves every old comforting dish can be experimented with and even tweaked into a new favorite! I loved how easy this dish was. It seems as if there were alot of steps involved, but really it was not bad. I made the sauce as I boiled water and cooked the pasta. It took less than a half hour to complete!

I did not attempt to feed this to Sophia. My sister and her boys came over tonight for some traditional holiday fun, so we fed the kids some pizza. Both my sister and I did have seconds. She justified her seconds, because my bowl was bigger than hers. I justified my seconds, purely because she went for seconds.

Each year we get together to decorate gingerbread houses and trees. We plan for it to be a fun activity for the kids, however we usually wind up taking control and not letting the kids have much say in the decorating. They like to run around together. Whenever they pop their heads up to the table, they wind up shaking the table and eating the candy. It is nice to have tradition. One thing that has become tradition is each year on gingerbread night, we wind up with a Christmas catastrope. Our first year, Santa came to visit and the kids were petrified. He rang the bell and as they peeked out the window they ran screaming their heads off into another room. Last year, my sister was devastated because the kids wound up knocking her tree over and shattering most of her glass ornaments that she had been collecting since she was a teenager. This year our meltdown came for Sophia. We have an elf on the shelf in our household. His name is Scott. The one rule of all elves on the shelves is there is no touching allowed. Touching means the elf will lose his magic and cannot report back to Santa. My 3 year old nephew, Collin has an elf of his own but does not buy into the story. He touched his own elf yesterday and tonight he touched Scott. Sophia was heartbroken! We wrote a letter to Santa to ask for Scott to have his magic back since she was not the one that touched him. Luckily Santa is fair and allowed Scott to come back with his magic in tow. I don't know what I would have done if Scott could not be in our household at Christmas time. We love that little guy!