Cockles and Clam Chowder
One of my favorite things about living in the Pacific Northwest is the plethora of gathering and hunting that we can do alongside our usual homesteading. Nothing is more fun than spending a day at the coast and then enjoying a great meal of clam chowder with vegetables from the garden and fried wild turkey meat! This is all EXACTLY what we got to do last week during the Oregon coast’s minus tides!
Sometime during COVID-19 I found an account on Instagram called Kitchen In The Wild! I quickly became a fan of the cooking, content, and great personality of its host, Katie, and her husband, Jed. They live in beautiful Waldport, a place that I have family and have enjoyed crabbing (pre boat dock construction) out of for years with my grandfather and cousins, as well as the occasional bay duck hunt with my dad and adopted hunting grandpa.
Katie’s posts are so engaging and so fun that my mom and I were inspired to head to the ocean and take the time raking for cockles. Despite never having done it nor having the correct equipment, we somehow got the rest of my family to go as well and was pleasantly surprised that it was a family outing that everyone enjoyed! Even those that are typically cautious of water!
Cockle rakes were sold out everywhere before and after our first adventure so we decided to jump back over to rake in some new ones with our handy dandy garden rakes. That’s when we made a new friend who we will call Ron. Ron had manufactured his own cockle rake and in true neighborly fashion, he went and got it from his pickup to let us use. His great advice went even further than that - he even took us to the place where he said they were the best to find!
I let my mom start with Ron’s infamous cockle rake and I was caught off guard when she was shortly at her limit of 20 cockles. I was only at FIVE!
It was blasphemy!
We switched rakes and I was amazed to see not one but two and even three cockles arrive on the rake each time it surfaced! I am so glad that I took pictures to see if we can get one made ourselves!
The cockles soaked in water until they purged their sand and then we cleaned them quickly, saving the guts to add to our smoke-ruined meat chickens for crab bait, and cutting up the meat for homemade clam chowder.