Want to celebrate seafood on a shoestring budget? With this entre you’ll be dishing up romance and building up your travel account at the same time. Bonus? This is another one of those recipes you can basically eye-ball in order to come out with the batch size you want.

Two main keys to saving money on this meal? Bulk canned clams and DIY white sauce mix. Bulk canned clams can be purchased at either Sam’s Club or Costco. If you don’t have a large warehouse store near you, you can at least get the 28 ounce size cans of clams on Amazon. One large can get yield a large batch of creamy clam sauce from which the leftovers can be used for either chowder or dip. Talk about a multi-purpose recipe.

Here’s what you need: one giant can of clams (juice reserved), one package of reduced fat cream cheese, an amount of white sauce mix suitable for the size of the batch you are making, olive oil, dried Parmesan or Romano to taste, an optional amount of skim milk or fat free half and half,  sea salt and cracked peppercorns.

Mix the white sauce mix with the clam juice instead of water. This will really nail the flavor element without unnecessary salt additives from standard seafood bases. Add in the reduced fat cream cheese and allow to melt, along with any amount of the milk you feel is necessary to give you the desired weight to your sauce. Too much sauce mix can easily result in a wall paper paste type of consistency. If this happens, it is easily thinned out with milk. Add in the clams, a bit of olive oil and seasonings. You can either make this on the fly, or slow simmer in a crock pot, providing you don’t over-cook things until the milk solids separate.  

While certainly suitable for a fettuccini or linguini noodle, I feel penne is an often overlooked option for medium weight sauces. With this in mind, I served my most recent batch of white clam sauce with Garofalo’s new addition to their signature line, the whole wheat penne rigate.  The ridges as well as the hollow space inside the pasta make for an excellent vehicle of flavor.  

Looking for an affordable way to sex it up and take the entre to the next level? Consider some chopped scallions or fresh parsley for a garnish, along with some freshly grated specialty cheese. Serve with a nice organic white wine  or a decent boxed blush spritzer. Then, meander out to the patio for at-home al fresco dining on the cheap.

Flickr Photo Credit: Jasper Yue

I thought it might be fun to do a category post with a few ideas included, since some of these are so simple. Those of you who have traveled extensively in the Middle East know how much the sharing of beverages is integrated into the culture. Here are a few ideas that are outside of the basic “tea experience”.

• Nana – If you’ve ever had “chai bil nana” or tea with mint, then the name of this hot drink will sound familiar to you. It was introduced to me by an American expat coworker of mine who is married to a man from Lebanon. If it is late in the evening, and you are leaning away from having any more caffeine, you may want to try ordering just plain “nana” or mint for your hot beverage while you linger over sheesha pipes with the girls. It’s basically just some broken up mint leaves with boiling water poured over the top and left to steep. It’s soothing, social, and caffeine free.

• Cinnamon - The lady who owned the school I taught at in Kuwait had several Egyptian traditions in her family. We were all invited for New Year’s Eve at her house during Ramadan one year. This is the drink she served. It’s apparently a traditional Ramadan drink in Egypt. Basically, she slow-stewed cinnamon sticks in water over a bed of coals for the day. You could add sugar if you wanted, but just on it’s own it was a nice hot beverage with a fabulous aroma.

• Lemon with Mint – Basically, you just mix up your lemonade as you normally would via the concentrate juice or fresh lemons. From there, you strip a bunch of mint leaves from your house plant (or buy some if you don’t grow it at home) and toss them into the blender with the lemon drink. This breaks down the leaves to little bits and distributes the mint flavor more efficiently through the beverage. You can even freeze a bit of the lemon drink ahead of time and mix it in with the liquid lemon beverage and mint leaves to have a frozen version of this popular drink.

• Ginger – This was first introduced to me in Saudi Arabia. I think most of us have tried the general ginger tea available in most western grocery stores, but this is just straight slices or grated pieces of ginger root in boiling water, left to steep. I warn you, this stuff without sweetener is definitely a taste you will have to work to acquire. However, the Saudis swear by the healing properties of this beverage when you are on the edge of coming down with something. I was over there on a business trip for several weeks and after numerous days and evenings of working around the clock and having dinner at midnight (not that I’d trade the lamb chop BBQ under the palm trees and stars with the camels for anything – way cool), I was starting to get run down. Everyone pumped me full of this stuff, and I swear I felt much better. I spoke with someone who had a background in herbal medicine once and was told it was because ginger raises your internal body temperature similar to what your system does naturally, using a fever to kill germs. I don’t have a huge medical background, and you may want to run it by your physician as well before using it as your sole means of recovery from illness. I just know it worked for me, and they’ve been using it in that country for generations. Worth a try, at least.

Photo credits: The Wolf, Ms. Tea, View from 5’2”, Heroic Beer, Jim Reeves