Actually, the clasisc thing to do is serve it melted on boiled potatoes. Or so my Swiss grandmother believed.
Well, you know... On the whole, fine, but I shudder at the thought of store-bought gravy. Ms. Moon may have problems with it, but it's really not hard. Indeed, gravy is just a bechamel variant, and any half-way competent cook should be able to do it. To whit:
First, make a roux with the fat left in cooking the turkey. You can pour it into a pan (scraping the roasting pan to add the non-burnt bits, which will add flavor), or you can try to make it in the roasting pan (which is trickier). You want roughly 1/4 cup of turkey fat; if you have more, pour the rest off.
Add 1/4 cup flour, and whisk over low heat until blended--this is important, as if it isn't sufficiently blended, you will have lumps.
Take 2 cups broth or (for cream gravy) milk. I usually make broth by boiling the neck and giblets with a carrot, onion skins and cut off ends from other dinner preparations, and 4-6 peppercorns, but canned is fine.
Add broth a little at a time, whisking after each addition until smooth.
Add 1/2 tsp thyme or sage; 1/2 tsp salt; a grind or two of pepper. If desired, add chopped giblets. Add more liquid if too thick, or boil for a bit if too thin. Taste and adjust salt.
This does make me think that in future, the necessary final volume in an author's collected works will not be "The Letters of..." but "The Blog Posts of..."
Bah. "Little necks" are not steamers. Little necks are hard-shelled clams best eaten raw.
Steamers are soft(er) shelled clams, generally dug from sand along ocean inlets (hence the need to clean with water and corn--though a good fishmongers will have cleaned them already, just as you rarely need to keep catfish in the bathtub and feed then cornmeal any more).
Steamers, because of their fragile shells and their need for cleaning, are not often or easily eaten on the half-shell.
Here's what you're not going to like: $10 for 3 dozen is an extraordinarily low price for little necks, and my guess is that these were old and past-date, and could no longer be sold for raw consumption. Hence they were sold as "steamers" with the expectation that the consumer would cook them thoroughly before eating.
But they aren't what, you know, us yankees call steamers.
Genuine steamers (also known as "piss clams") are very hard to find these days, for two reasons: First, the inlets where they thrive are these days often too polluted for safe harvesting. No steamers out of the Great South Bay, few out of the Sound, still some out of Peconic Bay. (Massachusetts and Delmarva residents may substitute their own placenames).
Second, steamers were cheap "clam shack" food twenty years ago, and while commonly available in seafood restaurants, got a reputation as cheapo, de classe food, and went out of fashion.
In recent years, the only steamers I've seen for sale at fish stores have been at the Wainscott Fish Store in the Hamptons--and at the Whole Foods on 14th (I grabbed them instantly).
Cooked, you can find excellent versions at Pier 116 in Boerum Hill, and the Peal Oyster Bar in the Village.
Well, fff...
Tell him to email "Eric S. Raymond"
Open source god and serious skiffy geek. Sure he'd be happy to help out.
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