Acidman has a post up about cooking seafood. One of the reasons I first moved to Seattle is that I love the ocean. I love seafood, plain and simple, and the Pacific Northwest has it in spades. Dungeoness Crab, clams, mussles, shrimp, salmon, halibut, it's all there. Fresh and sometimes you can get it live. There's a store nearby that has live dungeoness crab for $2.69 a pound. Hot damn!

Whenever I go visit relatives on the East Coast, I always get either fresh lobster or Chesepeak Bay blue crab. I just love seafood.

So, since A-Man has his cooking tips up, I'm going to give you my reciepe for steaming clams.

You need the right clams. Littlenecks don't quite do it, you need actuall steamers. Manila clams are probably the best, but any small clams will do.

Chop up about 2 cloves of garlic for every pound of clams. Toss the garlic in a pan with half a stick of butter. Once the butter melts, and the garlic is sizzling, toss the clams in whole. Then pour a bottle of good strong beer on top of it all. A good ESB works best, but any good beer will do. Bring everything to a boil. When all the clams are open, they're done. I normally remove the clams as they open, and put them in a bowl. Any clams that don't open are bad, just toss 'em. All the clams should open in about 5-10 minutes, depending on how much beer you're cooking them in. Once they're all done, pour some of the broth over the clams and serve 'em up.

You get messy, but you don't care. I normally use the shell of a clam to dig the meat out of another shell. They work just like tweezers. Serve a loaf of sourdough bread with the clams and you'll have yourself a damn good meal.

Did I mention that I love seafood? Mmmmmmmmmm, seafood........