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My Share for #BeautifulSunday initiated by @ace108

It has been a crazy week with all the happenings going on. It is amazing to see the community rising up for what we believe in as we are Steem.

To take a break, I would like to share with you a recipe and I have missed cooking. I know some of you had the dilemma of not knowing what to have for lunch. Here we often eat meat or vegetable dish along with rice as part of our daily diet. My wife, on the other hand, loves pasta and has been avoiding rice for months now. She wanted me to cook a pasta dish but I wanted to have rice for lunch. Anyway, in the end, she won and here is what we ended up having for lunch. Today I'll take you on a walk to our local market and share with you what I did this morning.

Creamy Clam Pasta

To get the freshest ingredients all we need to do is head out to our local market. Here you could get fresh, seafood, meat and vegetables daily. Our city is surrounded by water which makes seafood readily available to everyone. In the Philippines, we call the market place "Palengke" a word which is Spanish influenced. The Palengke is divided into sections for meat, seafood and vegetables. Besides that, there are also individual stalls which is like a mini grocery selling vegetables, different spices, eggs and canned food.

This is one of the stalls in the vegetable section but as you could see they also sell canned goods. This is one way to maximize their earnings as they still need to pay for the stall rental. They often have everything that you need when it comes to cooking. This is the favorite vendor of my wife as they sell various types of vegetables and herbs which others do not have. Most importantly they have basil and parsley, which we will need in our recipe.

Those baby potatoes looks good buttered, roasted with garlic and a sprinkle of parsley. We will skip that for now as we only have the budget for our pasta today.

Originally we were planning to have shrimp with our pasta but something caught my attention. It is a variety of clam that I have not seen before. It looked interesting as the shells were larger than the normal clams that we have here. The vendor told me that they were scallops but I think it is a variety of a clam. The scallops that I know of has a wider but thinner shell.

Other than that he also sold snails which were caught from a rice field. These are perfect cooked with coconut milk and I wanted to buy some but again we had to stick to our plan.

I found out that these are a species of freshwater clams and some are abundant near mangrove trees.

We bought almost a kilo for around 100 pesos which is around $2.00 USD. Price seems to be fair enough don't you think?

Back at home, I had all the ingredients laid on the table. My wife already warned me of not making too much mess.

Ingredients:

Clams
Large onion
Cloves of garlic
Dried chili flakes
Cheese
Heavy cream
Soup stock
Basil
Parsley

Dried chili flakes will add that extra spice if you like it hot.

Make sure to cleam the clams first. I had to brush off some of the dirt from the shells. It is also important to soak them in water for a couple of minutes. In this process the clams would expell some unwanted materials.

Let's begin

Chop the large onion into small pieces as we will sauté them later.

Chopping onions is a tear jerker and I often wet my eyes with water which seems to help a little.

Also chop the garlic cloves.

Next would be the fresh parsley that we bought in the market earlier.

Chop them into small pieces.

Set aside the chopped ingredients.

We will need to grate some cheese for that extra richness in flavor. I used just the regular cheese as it is the only thing that we have. I think using Parmesan cheese would be great if available.

Set aside the grated cheese and the more the better. It would be completely up to you how much you would like to use.

Time to cook the noodles.

Cooking noodles would need to be just right as we don't want it to be soggy.

Taste the noodles once in awhile to know if you have achieved the desired texture. Remove the noodles and immerse in cool water to stop the cooking process.

The clams would need to be cooked first before we could mix it with our sauce later.

I used the water where I cooked the noodles but you can use fresh water if desired.

Wait for all the clams to open which is an indication that it is ready.

Remove from heat and set aside once they have opened. Some clams would not open which is normal. Unopened clams does not necessarily mean they are bad but make sure to smell them first before adding to the batch.