Food for the first day of school

Tomorrow is the first day of school for my daughter, and I gotta say I'm a little bit excited. I suppose she and I would have different perspectives on her last two months, but to me it seems that she had a very "relaxing" summer. I believe it is time for her to go back to exercising her brain. In between some time out with friends and a week visiting her cousin in Florida, it seems to me that the remainder of her time was spent binge-watching episodes of SVU, Criminal Minds, and Gray's Anatomy.

In our house, any milestone is marked with food -- typically with a meal of choice for whomever is the center of attention. Birthdays, of course, but also half-birthdays, end of testing periods, good grades, first day of a new job, and certainly, the first day of school, are all marked with some sort of special meal. My daughter's meals of choice tend to the rich and carnivorous, like steak and lobster, or the rather labor intensive cioppino and gumbo. For her back-to-school meal this year, she selected my grilled clams on linguini with a homemade Caesar dressing. I can do that.

The grilled clams are a dish that I learned from my brother in Florida. It is a really easy preparation yielding a very high satisfaction-to-effort ratio. Basically, put some little neck clams directly on the grids of a hot grill and close the lid for a few minutes. As the clams open, take them off the grill, and dip them into a buttery-garlicky sauce which is heating in a pan alongside the clams, and then into a bowl. If you can hold off everyone from eating the clams as they come out of the dip, put them on top of some cooked linguini, and dump the remaining garlic-butter into the pasta.

A great accompaniment to the gilled linguini with clams is a nice Caesar salad. Since my son is a vegetarian, and the ready made dressings are usually made with anchovies, the two are not a good match. He used to really enjoy Caesar salad, so I wanted to find a way to make this part of the meal something we could all enjoy. I made an easy dressing with garlic, Worcestershire sauce, lemon juice, dijon mustard, and parmesan cheese. Instead of the traditional raw or coddled egg, I used mayonnaise, but the dressing was still missing the salty-briny tang of the anchovies. I decided to mash some capers as an anchovy substitute, which turned out to be a very nice addition.

So, my daughter thoroughly enjoyed her meal, and the rest of us, including my son, were quite pleased. Let's hope that the meal for her last day of summer was sufficiently satisfying enough to carry her through the first day of school onto the next celebratory meal -- what should we make for National Bad Poetry Day?