After passing through the grocery store aisles for years and eyeing the Clamato Juice cocktail with curiosity, I finally broke down and bought some.  I actually resisted buying it for a long time, since its ingredients included high fructose corn syrup.  (Why HFCS is bad.) It was also sort of a suspicious, unnatural red color.

However, I couldn’t stand it anymore.  One day I bought some.  The whole idea of clams and tomatoes together was actually very appealing.  Afterall, weren’t they the stars in my favorite Italian clams dish?

I have to say that I really loved the stuff.  It was/is the perfect morning jolt, with enough flavor and salty sweetness to get me moving.  I guess you could say I became addicted to Clamato.  Have a midnight craving?  Drink Clamato.  Thirsty after eating a bag of pork rinds while working on the computer?  Drink Clamato.  Happy?  Drink Clamato.  Mad?  Drink Clamato.  Pregnant?  But, at nearly $5 a bottle, it was more expensive than fricking orange juice.  I went through 2 bottles a week.

As much joy as it was giving me, I cringed every time I put a bottle into my grocery cart or took one out of my fridge.  Still high fructose corn syrup in there?  Yep.  Still strange coloring?  Yep.  Despite channeling subliminal requests (a la Richard Gere) to the Mott’s Company to amend their recipe, my favorite beverage was becoming a serious source of cognitive dissonance.

Observing my predicament one day, Mr. Artifact suggested, “Why don’t you make your own?”  In fact, he even collected some ingredients at the grocery store for me.  I tried a number of recipes that I found on the web from souls as conflicted as mine.  But, they (the recipes) were weak approximations.  Clam juice was the recommended ingredient to get the clammy flavor into the juice, but it was not coming through once diluted in the tomato juice.  Mott’s appeared to use dried clams, which weren’t on my grocer’s shelves.  Again, Mr. Artifact came to the rescue and brought home a can of clams (Snow’s, a product of USA. Yay!).  These were liquefied in my trusty Oster Blender.  And viola!  This was a significant improvement, but still not kicky enough.  We finally settled on adding some fish sauce, a key ingredient in Southeast Asian cooking.  A few more improvements to get the tart, sweet and salty mixture resulted in the additions of Worcestershire Sauce, beef broth, catsup, vinegar, and lemon juice.