Serves 4

Prep time: 1.5 hours if you make pasta from scratch, 20 minutes with store bought pasta

For years, this is the meal that Josh asked me to make for him on his birthday. Although we are both from the Pacific Northwest, it took us moving to Boston to truly fall in love with seafood. This recipe was born the way most I write are - rushing through grocery shopping on the way home from work when I’m expecting company in a period of time that most people would find stressful. The first time I made this, I bought the pasta (the grocery store was a 5 minute walk from home, and friends were coming over in a half hour; fresh pasta was not in the cards), but I enjoy making the pasta from scratch when time allows. If you do store-bought pasta, you will need an extra lemon; adding the lemon zest to pasta when it is half-cooked allows it to absorb the lemon flavor and brightens the dish.

For the pasta (optional; if making from scratch, if you use store bought, buy ~1lb of vermicelli or angel hair)

3 cups flour

1 tsp salt

½ tsp pepper

4 eggs

zest from one lemon

For the clams and sauce

2 shallots, diced

2T Olive oil

1 tsp salt

½ tsp pepper

3 cloves of garlic, diced

12 littleneck or countneck clams

6 thin slices prosciutto, diced

2T unsalted butter

1/2 cup dry white wine

1 lemon, juice and zest

2/3 cup coarsely grated parmesan cheese

3 springs fresh rosemary

First, make the pasta. Gently mix the flour, salt, pepper and eggs together until a dough forms. The traditional way to do this is to put a pile of flour on a cutting board and add the eggs, salt and pepper into the well you make in the middle of the flour by hand. Sometimes I do that, sometimes I feel like having less to clean and do it in a mixer. Once mixed, the dough should not be flaky, but firm and reasonably dry. If the dough is flaky, or does not stay together, spray with a little bit of water. When the dough is formed, form it into a ball and allow it to rest in a bowl covered with plastic wrap for 5-10 minutes. Next, use a rolling pin to roll the dough as thin as you feel comfortable, then cut it into a rectangle and feed it through a pasta roller several times, each time reducing the thickness of your pasta. On the last pass through the pasta machine, cut the pasta into vermicelli - typically the thinnest setting. There are people who roll and cut the pasta by hand; I have great admiration for them, but when I try to do this, it does not work out well.

Start a pot of salted water boiling. At the same time, to make the sauce and clams, add 2T olive oil at high heat to the bottom of a large dutch oven. Add the shallots, salt and pepper, and sauté until translucent, or about 4 minutes. Add garlic and prosciutto and sauté for an additional 2 minutes. Add wine and lemon juice to deglaze the bottom of the pan. Once all of the browned bits have been scrapped up from the bottom of the pan, add clams and whole springs of rosemary, and cover, until clams open (about 4 minutes).

While you are waiting for the clams to open, drop your pasta into the salted water. Boil the pasta for approximately two minutes (depending on the thickness of your pasta - this could be more or less). When the pasta is half cooked, drain the pasta - it will finish cooking in the sauce. If you use store-bought pasta, mix it with 1t of lemon zest and allow it to sit for 1 minute - this will allow the pasta to absorb the lemon flavor.

Once clams have started to open, add butter and ⅓ cup of parmesan cheese. Whisk the sauce together until smooth. Add the pasta to the dutch oven and cook for one additional minute, covered, until pasta is al dente and clams have fully opened. Add additional parmesan cheese and lemon zest to the top of the pasta, to taste.

Vermicelli with Clams and Prosciutto

Elote stuffed avocados