Recipes

Healthy Fried Clams

Fried clams are delicious. They taste a lot like fried calamari. Most chicken-nugget-and-french-fry-loving toddlers will devour them with no complaints.

Clams are also extremely high in iron. In fact, clams have more iron than any other food. If you are looking for ways to get more iron into your family members, this recipe is your ticket.

I was recently diagnosed with iron deficiency anemia. I’ll have to write up a post with what happened but in a nutshell, I found out I had H. Pylori — and H. Pylori thrives on iron. It’s been a few weeks since I started on the supplements… and I am starting to feel much better. (Watch for that post any day now… writing it up now… And be sure to sign up for my email updates to get notified when I post.)

I wrote this post originally in 2009, when my daughter Kate was 2 years old. She was diagnosed at the time with anemia, and this fried clam recipe did the trick to reverse her condition. I fed her clams a 2 or 3 times over a one month period, and we went back to the doctor and her iron was normal.

Here’s the original post I wrote… with the recipe to follow:

It may seem like I’m doing a lot of fried food these days, and I suppose that’s true. But I just (a) got a new deep fryer, (b) rendered a whole lot of beef tallow, and (c) ordered a gallon of palm oil and five gallons of expeller-pressed coconut oil. So I’m having fun playing.

Plus, it’s tough when you’ve got a toddler on your hands who’s addicted to French fries. So addicted, that anytime we go to a restaurant and anyone at the table orders fries, she refuses to eat anything else.

Speaking of said toddler, see my post about the fact that she is slightly anemic. I think it was “milk anemia”, which is fairly common for this age group.

Which is why I whipped up this dish of fried clams for her. Did you know that clams are really high in iron? Who knew? Popeye should have been noshing on fried clams, not spinach.

Healthy Fried Clams

It turns out that clams have more iron than any other food. In one 2.5 ounce serving of clams, you get a whopping 21 mg of iron. That’s almost 3 times more iron than chicken liver (8.7 mg for 2.5 ounces) and almost 9 times more than beef (2.4 mg).