Glen Caldwell, kitchen manager for Offshore Ale Company in Oak Bluffs, puts together a simple but delicious pasta dish with chopped clams, lemon, and lots of fresh black pepper. “In a perfect world,” says Glen, “you will have dug and steamed open your own clams, and you’ll have made or purchased fresh pasta. Frozen chopped clams from the market and pasta from a box will work fine too. You can increase or decrease any of these ingredients to adjust to your taste buds. This dish cooks super fast; once prepped, the cook time on this is about two minutes.”

Serves 2

• 10–12 ounces linguine
• Pinch of salt
• 1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
• 2 tablespoons fresh minced garlic
• 3/4 cup chopped steamed clams with about 2 ounces (1/4 cup) cooking liquid or clam juice*
• 3/4 tablespoon coarse ground black pepper
• 2 tablespoons fresh chopped flat-leaf parsley
• 1/4 lemon
• Parmesan cheese, to taste

1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Add linguine and salt, and cook al dente, according to package directions.

2. While pasta is cooking, heat olive oil in a sauté pan, then add garlic. Before the garlic starts to brown, add clams and liquid to heat them briefly. (The liquid from the clams will prevent the garlic from burning and becoming bitter.) While stirring, quickly add pepper and salt, to taste, and then add parsley. Remove from heat.

3. Toss the clam mixture with linguine and squeeze the juice from lemon wedge over the dish. Garnish with Parmesan cheese and serve with bread for cleaning the bowl.

*Cooking fresh clams: To get about 3/4 cup chopped clams, it takes between 3 and 4 dozen fresh littlenecks or cherrystone clams (fewer if using chowder quahaugs). In a wide-bottomed pan with a lid, bring about 1 cup water to a boil. Add the clams, cover, and steam until the clams open (3 to 4 minutes for littlenecks or cherrystones). Let cool slightly, remove from the shell, and chop into small pieces.

This recipe was originally published with the article, All About Shellfish.