One thing about me: I have a thirst for hard work and idiocy. To my detriment, I gravitate toward silly, burdensome projects. Often, I think, OK, what’s the dumbest thing I can do here?, then I do that. My entire career—cook, comedian, writer—relies on a steady stream of dumb ideas and foolish masochism.
For example, I recently went camping for the first time, and I decided to make linguine and clams.
Two months ago, a friend invited me to go backpacking in Michigan. This friend also tasked me with figuring out what to cook. Now, what I know how to cook is pasta. I spent over a decade working in Italian restaurants, and for years I operated my own pasta pop-up in Los Angeles.
“Pasta is not camping food,” I said matter-of-factly, staring at my friend’s text message. I’m positive that I took a moment to consider this. I had to. Sure, a jar of red sauce and some boiled pasta might make sense, but becoming a saucier out in the wilderness? Just not doable. You don’t have the tools, the space, or the resources. What are you going to do, Danny? Lug a bunch of white wine, olive oil, and canned clams 3 miles into the wilderness?
Oh no—that’s exactly what you’re going to do, isn’t it?
It’s as if I couldn’t help myself. I knew that it was a dumb idea, that it would be needlessly difficult and laborious. But then I pictured eating linguine and clams in the wilderness, near a tent, far from its intended home (the vinyl clothed table of a red-sauce joint), and I laughed. As soon as I laughed, it was over. A done deal. We were doing this. It was now a bit. It didn’t even require mental gymnastics; instead, I did a graceful pirouette and told myself everything was going to be perfect: We’ll have a fire! I’ll bring a pan!
Here are the ingredients I hauled into my camping pack—alongside toilet paper, bug spray, a knife, water, clothes, and other essentials:
1 pound of linguine
Several cans of good-quality chopped sea clams
A bottle of white wine
A bottle of olive oil
Garlic
An onion
Fresh parsley
Lemons
A hunk of good Pecorino Romano
Plus, some equipment:
A small wooden cutting board
My chef knife, wrapped in a towel
A microplane for lemon zest and cheese
A 12-inch sauté pan
Some rags
Earlier, I said that I’ve never been camping. What I should say is that I’ve always wanted to go but no one ever took me.
I grew up in a Catholic-as-hell Italian and Greek family. We weren’t outdoorsy. We didn’t hunt. We didn’t go hiking. We knew how to start fires only with charcoal and newspaper. While everybody else in my rural hometown was learning how to wield a bow and arrow, pitch a tent, and drive a tractor, my family was grilling sausage, playing boccie, listening to Italian polka, and yelling over one another during big Sunday dinners.
Then, at 39 years old, I met Liana Li, a fast friend and experienced camper here in Detroit, and I thought, Now’s my chance. Liana is not my dad; she’s a Chinese American urban farmer and textile artist. But for a few days, she showed me how to do a bunch of things my dad probably should have—how to set up a tent, how to filter water, how to poop in the woods (close your eyes and pray to whatever god you believe in that nobody sees you), and how to build a fire from pine needles, pine cones, and wood.
The two of us, accompanied by my rascally cattle dog, drove four hours west from Detroit and backpacked 2½ miles into the Nordhouse Dunes, a diverse wilderness area on the eastern shoreline of Lake Michigan. The first setback? My camping backpack was too heavy, and I hadn’t packed the olive oil properly.
By the time we arrived at the dunes and picked a campsite, it was dark, and I was sweaty, achy, sore, and somewhat defeated. The pasta equipment had added an extra strain on my shoulders and back while we trudged through the humid, hilly forest. It was all clearly too much for one person to carry, and my body paid the price.
Worse, the olive oil, which I had thought was nestled perfectly in a little pouch in my backpack, had spilled out onto some of my necessities and other foodstuffs. While I attempted to clean everything, the oil moisturized my hands, my arms, my face, and whatever else I touched. Kids in high school used to rudely accuse my family of sweating olive oil, and for a day, their prophecy came true. Luckily, I lost only a quarter of the bottle, but for the rest of the excursion, I lived with olive oil and sand touching just about everything I had brought with me.
While we were looking for the campsite, a fortuitous full moon shone upon a flat, mostly shaded area about half a klick away from the beach. It is true that everything tastes better while camping, but especially that first meal. While I sat exhausted, Liana built a fire and boiled water for some spicy, sweet-and-sour Kang Shi Fu beef-flavored instant ramen. I love Chinese ramen, and really any ramen that features a slick, spicy chile-oil packet. Noodles of all varieties need more oil. It’s how I finish every pasta dish, and the ramen was instantly more luxurious because of it.
The next day, we sat on the beach and dined on Triscuits and canned sardines while my dog accumulated a month’s worth of sand in her fur. We filtered water, hiked up and down the dunes, and picked sand cherries, and I spent an entire afternoon lying in a hammock where I decided that, should I ever enter hospice, it is my wish to die in a hammock. The word deathbed sounds awful. Death hammock, however, sounds kind of nice.
Then came Saturday evening. It was time to get to work.
Linguine and clams is a dish I’ve made hundreds of times. My personal recipe for it is based on rhythm, not science. The alchemy of the dish comes together through a series of motions; it is not simply the sum of its ingredients. It’s a song, and one that I knew I could play anywhere.
The hardest part would be to not get any sand in the food, so the first thing I did was carefully set up a chopping table in the dirt. I placed a small wooden cutting board on a beach towel, then, like a good Catholic boy, knelt and roughly chopped some garlic and onion.
Next, I made the sauce: A heavy dose of extra-virgin olive oil, several cloves of sliced garlic, sweet onion, and crushed red pepper swirled around a 12-inch sauté pan resting on a portable, foldable camping grill. I deglazed the pan with some white wine and took a couple of swigs of the unpleasantly warm, sun-cooked chardonnay. Finally, I added the juice from three cans of clams (just the juice; clams get rubbery when you overcook them), reducing, swirling, and sniffing the mixture for a few minutes until a viscous sauce formed.
I poured the sauce into a small camping pot meant for coffee, then filled the sauté pan back up with filtered water from Lake Michigan. Liana kept the fire roaring like a pro, adding pine needles and bits of wood as needed, and I slowly cooked ¾ of a pound of De Cecco linguine for about seven minutes. That’s way under al dente, but follow me on this journey. I know what I’m doing.
Giggling, I dumped out most of the pasta water, save for half a cup, poured in the clam sauce from the coffee pot, and cooked the linguine the rest of the way in the saucy, starchy water. The pasta absorbed and swelled with oceanic, winey liquid. This is the only way to make a proper linguine and clams. Overcooked noodles won’t do; you need to undercook them, then let your flavorful broth infuse each strand by steady simmering.
To finish, I ripped a ton of parsley with my hands, squeezed the juice of a lemon, added the chopped clams, and grated a rather generous amount of Pecorino Romano to stir in. I actually forgot to bring salt, so I used more Pecorino than normal to make up for the oversight.
Liana asked for more olive oil on top of her pasta, and I couldn’t have jumped out of my tiny, foldable REI chair faster. Liana, who grew up eating lots of Chinese ramen, knows the aforementioned value of adding oil to noodles. A good reminder that life is always improved by finding small luxuries where you can.
As we sat around Camp Clam, I thought about what the people camping around us were eating. Earlier, I had seen some folks cracking a few eggs in a skillet, and some others had come trudging into the dunes, carrying a box of pizza. None of that moves me. Where’s the joy in ripping open a package of almonds? Who gets a rush from pulling the top off a can of minestrone and unceremoniously dumping it into a pot?
I had thought that camping would be all about finding newfound appreciation for life by inserting myself into uncomfortable circumstances. But camping isn’t about being uncomfortable; it’s about creating comfort. That’s why we bring tents, sleeping bags, folding chairs, and phone chargers. It’s why we build fires to keep warm, and it’s why I made linguine and clams. For better or worse, I’m most comfortable when I, the fool, am on one of my errands.
When I used to work as a line cook, my co-workers would often say, “Work smarter, not harder,” but that’s an axiom I fully reject. Smart is boring—I say give yourself a ton of obstacles, work hard to overcome those obstacles that you’ve created for yourself, then bask in the overwhelming joy of the improbably resolved chaos.
Speaking of basking, our stomachs full and maybe even a little confused from consuming a displaced pasta dish out in the wilderness, we both walked to the beach to watch the sunset. The next morning, I woke up early to bathe myself in Lake Michigan. I scrubbed the olive oil from my clothes and skin, then packed up my kitchen tools to take home—the place some might say they “belong,” but that I can now assure you is only where they are “based.” Just be sure, if you decide to follow in my silly footsteps, to screw the oil cap on a little tighter than your head.