A truism about cooking is that if you lay a breaded coating onto just about anything and fry it up in a bit of oil, kids will eat it without objection. Still, it was with no minor degree of amazement that I was able to get a mess of fritters made from a notably pungent shellfish down our brood’s craws the other night.

I cannot claim sole authorship of this culinary experiment. My friend Jameson Ellis, who shares a certain curiosity about natural harvests, to put it mildly, had mused in passing about whether whelks might be prepared the way people in the Caribbean deal with conch. The question stuck.

The tide was extremely low at about midday on Saturday. Idling my boat over a sand flat that I can usually navigate without incident, I was surprised to suddenly, if gently, strike bottom, stirring up a dark cloud of silt. At anchor, I decided to seize the day and try for some clams.

When I was a child, this particular flat was loaded with sweet-tasting skimmer clams, but on Saturday there were none. There weren’t many quahogs either, and I felt a twinge of guilt taking the few methuselahs I scratched up. In the process, though, whelks came up in the rake, and, instead of throwing them back, I opted to toss them into my floating basket.

Their preparation was simple. Boiled for just a few minutes in salted water, they were easy to remove from their whorled shells. The meat took a trip through a food processor, then was blended with breadcrumbs, flour, chopped onion, an egg, salt, pepper, and a splash of beer (Montauk Brewing Company Driftwood Ale, if you must know). After some oil was nearly smoking in a wok, I cooked rough tablespoons of the battered whelk for a minute or two on each side, then drained them in a colander.

Traditionally, the knobbed whelks that became our dinner are considered predators, attacking clams and other shellfish. It is possible that by in turn making dinner of them, I may help the other, less mobile species that live under the same tides. We’ll see. It was a tasty undertaking at the very least.

About six dozen yellow irises greeted me on a gray morning this week, testimony to a place where others have lived and gardened before. The old lilacs aren’t as bountiful as I remember, waiting perhaps for  judicial pruning, but there are enough for bouquets.

To be sure, I am hardly a gardener, neglectful as I am of almost everything necessary to qualify. I’ve been known to put the wrong plants in the wrong places and then gone on to mourn those that are lost. The deer are responsible for more depredations than I am, though, and I just can’t bring myself to put up fencing. The deer relished the rose bushes, although two or three may survive, and it probably is true that they were put in where there wasn’t enough sun. I’m not sure what eradicated the astilbe, although, like the lilies of the valley, they probably were choked out by a persistent groundcover, which I have failed to get rid of because it is the earliest thing hereabouts to flower.

The irises, a bounty from someone’s effort in times past, are not the only pleasures of the garden this spring. They followed the blooming of four or five varieties of yellow narcissus, with various clutches of petals. And, while it is true that an earlier generation’s tiger lilies in another part of the yard were long since executed by the deer, their places have been taken by batches of white narcissus with a fragrant scent reminiscent of paper whites that are blooming still.

The white narcissus are coinciding now with flowering viburnum bushes, which although misshapen by the deer so that they now branch out into straight shelves some four feet off the ground, are attractive nevertheless. And I shouldn’t ignore the forsythia, which decorated the place earlier in the season.

I don’t think there will be further come-by-chance surprises in the garden this summer. Instead, I will watch over the nepeta and lavender I put in the beds last year, which are said to be deer resistant and may therefore survive.  

Eastern Long Island (the Hamptons, if you insist) is a world of extraordinary gardens, designed by dedicated amateurs and talented professionals and nurtured with love — and lots of work. But there is something to be said about old backyards.

One of the small pleasures at the office occurs when the latest copy of The Vineyard Gazette arrives. We have had a subscription to this lovely, old-fashioned broadsheet for a long time now, and it is always interesting to see how that island, not all that dissimilar from the East End of Long Island, copes with some of the same pressures.

Two stories in the May 23 Gazette could have been set here. In one, residents were outraged at the quality of the material placed to replenish an eroded beach. The Town of Oak Bluffs will remove an unspecified quantity of dredging spoils, presumably as nasty as they sound, from two locations.

Though protesters have not taken to the streets here, as they did on the Vineyard, it has been noted that the fill passing for sand at Georgica and at Montauk’s downtown beaches is less than ideal. As here, the Vineyard spoils met state standards for purity, which, according to the descriptions in the Gazette, are far from the cleanest, best sand. “Sludge,” some picketers at Inkwell Beach called it.

Elsewhere on the same page of the paper, there was a story about the Tisbury selectmen reducing the length of time that visiting boaters can anchor off Vineyard Haven out of concern about water pollution.

Two pages on was a discussion of whether the Vineyard’s five school districts should be combined. With a sole superintendent, that island is already a step ahead of the South Fork, where each district not only has an administrative head but most have at least one principal.

As here, the districts all send their older students to a single high school. Past opposition has included fear of losing local control, but variances among the offerings at the Vineyard’s lower schools has meant that some kids are better prepared than others, depending on where they come from. Standardizing elementary education might come with advantages, the idea’s backers said.

Here, as there, it is difficult to say how the school consolidation debate will play out. James Weiss, the Vineyard’s superintendent, told a recent meeting of that island’s League of Women Voters, “We have an outstanding school system. If we could do it better and more efficiently, we should do it.” That sentiment, and the Vineyard’s progress on this and other questions, are worth watching.

There is an old saw that says you should build your second house first.  

What?

Well, by the time you are on your second house, you have learned enough from the first one to apply that knowledge to the next one. That makes whacky sense, but it just sort of works if you are doing a renovation.

Consider that your first/original house (inherited, bachelor digs, divorce gift) no longer works for you, but you are used to it and you love the location. You know where the sun comes up and what you would want to look at if only the windows were wider, taller, or moved a foot to the left or right.

So call this future renovation the not-quite-second house because half of it you learned from and the other half you have no clue about.

Naturally, you expect the plan drawer-upper to find certain mistakes in your semi-architectural sketches and notes. (Do not.) You expect the builder-project manager to take you aside and say, “Ya know, if you just thought about having that cellar be a” — read: “trophy” — “basement you would have a lot more space. . . .”

But not everyone tells you stuff in ways you can hear it. We got a cellar and not a “trophy” basement. Twelve years ago, who really knew about the (under)groundswell of the magical third floor that can exist below grade?! But I digress.

We got the house we asked for. Really. But we didn’t get or didn’t really hear the expertise we might have been given. Herewith some of what we learned 12 years after the fact.

We should have:

• Given ourselves a first-floor bedroom with an en-suite bathroom for guests and/or old people with stair issues. (We didn’t do it, and that was a lesson learned too late.)

• Gotten the (trophy) basement with inside stairs. Didn’t, because it ate up too much inside floor space, and I thought basements always had spiders and were basically creepy. In the early 2000s we had never thought about a “third-floor” basement. Amazing, since it’s now such a part of the building vernacular.

• Planned for gutters instead of having to retrofit a few years ago.

• Considered a really big mudroom.

• Known that living here year round we would have seasonal clothes that would not really fit in the summer-house closets.

• Remembered that everyone needs their own room/office/den/cave/space. Sharing is complicated.

• Had the ceilings painted glossy from the start.

One thing we did do: Put the washing machine near where the clothes live (second floor). Lugging laundry is overrated exercise.

The fun/frustrating list is what we would love to change, add, tweak. (Are you listening, New York State Lottery?) I will be leaving “pie in the sky” for another “Relay.” Stay tuned.

Here’s what we were surprised by last year: That the washing machine would wear out (after 12 years). We don’t do that much laundry, really, but apparently they have a built-in obsolescence. Well, replacement wasn’t the worst surprise. The real surprise was that the new washer and dryer (stacking, smallest available) would no longer fit into that little closet we had built to house them. Now they make them deeper to make them narrower. This required an emergency robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul solution, expanding the closet by diminishing the room behind. You win by loss, sort of. Well, there is no predicting old age, in people or machines, but the mechanical engineers really pulled a fast one.

Last year we were also surprised by a massive leak in the ceiling of the kitchen. The ceiling paint held the leak for a while, but the ballooning ceiling was alarming. “Call the super! Wait, we are the super; this is a house.” When we found a fixer we had to open the roof to find out that our 12-year-old kitchen roof had had a slow leak all along. When the kitchen skylight had to be replaced along with the roof, we learned from the fixer that the flashing at the true top of a skylight is abundant, less so at the bottom edge. The flashing around our kitchen skylight was basically nil. Looking back, we guess the building crew just didn’t realize that top edge of a skylight has more flashing — and when putting them in backwards they cut away the extra flashing at the lower edge. It turns out that all of our skylights are backwards. Big surprise!

Then there are the things you wish someone had pointed out before or during the renovation. These are the things nobody warns you about because they assume you know. To wit, a one-story house sees the side of the garage, a two-story house . . . well, the view is no longer the side of the garage; the view is the roof of the garage. Surprise! You will want a new roof there, too.

Another surprise is ice dams.

Nobody tells you when you become a year-round summer person to get the snow away from your shingles. It’s hard enough to shovel a path on the deck, why would I clear the snow away from the house? Why would I ask someone to do that?

ICEDAMN, or damned ice dam, that’s why.

On the verge of our 12th spring, we were in for yet another little surprise.

During recent winters, snow piled on our nice back deck. We cleared paths to the driveway, but that was all we did. Twelve winters of snow/ice/melting/ freezing and more snow got up and under the lowest shingles at the join with the deck. It snuck into the house and buckled the floor in our pantry along the outside wall. How long did it take? I have no idea. It was only today, when I put a few empty bottles on the floor of the pantry and the bottles fell over, that I came face to face with the result. On my hands and knees (no easy task) I saw that a corner floorboard was heaved and dark with water stain. While the area was free of mold and damp, clearly the floor was compromised. Outside the shingles kiss the deck. My guess, though I cannot yet swear to it, is there is no flashing around our deck. Very likely the building crew/skylight putter-inners, who also built our deck, never flashed where it met the house.

Surprise, house, it is your 12th birthday. Feeling old, are ya?

Rebuilding the deck is not an option right now, when we really need that en-suite bathroom (see above), so shoveling is in my future. Unless you are still listening, Lottery God.

Crap happens in and to your house.

Some are things you can live with or fix (leaks, ice dams), and some things you just have to live with no matter what. When your neighbor’s house becomes a monster construction site, their pretty willow tree drops stuff in your gutters, which clog, overflow, and get mildewed on the shady side of your house; when other neighbor’s hedge grows so high and you lose your cutting garden to shade.

Not to worry.

Crap happens.

Take heart, though, because going forward, in this area, there will be fewer and fewer opportunities for renovations. Why? Because everything is a teardown. My house, your house, the house down the road. Anything built after 1900 and not considered historic is destined to be rubble as soon as the closing is over.

So, dear future renovators, if you inherit your mom’s house, fix it up for you and your lifestyle. Pay as close attention as you can, but don’t go nuts because the house you are in, when sold, will be razed, and in place will grow a brand-new, trophy-basemented, en-suite-bathroomed, gambrel-roofed, 12-foot-ceil­ing­ed house — built by a guy who still might put the skylights in backwards.

Just remember, when you sell, it will be for the land and the location, so patch what’s broken and get on with your life. No worries, mon.

Durell Godfrey, a contributing photographer for The Star, loves watching buildings being built because “That’s the stuff that dreams are made of.”

Have you heard the news about the 10-fold increase, since 2011, in the number of children coming illegally and by themselves into the United States? The Obama administration has called it a humanitarian crisis. Almost unbelievably, it is estimated that 60,000 children will be apprehended this year trying to get into the U.S. across our Southwestern borders. Many of these children — from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador — are placed in the care of a federal agency called the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Others, from Mexico, are routinely sent back home.

These children are, in my mind, refugees — not of war, per se, but of a world order that is wildly and wickedly out of balance. The United Nations high commissioner for refugees reports that half of those interviewed said they had experienced or been threatened with serious harm. According to the World Bank, 60 percent of the eight million citizen of Honduras live in poverty, and drugs, street gangs, and organized crime are prevalent there. Some of the children who arrive at our border without adult supervision are said to have set off in hopes of finding relatives here.

At the end of World War II, when I was growing up, I was frightened by what I heard about refugees. Displaced persons (D.P.s, as they were known) had fled their homes during the war, survived forced labor or the concentration camps, or found themselves hungry and impoverished in a devastated world. There are said to have been 12 million refugees at the end of the war, with 800,000 still in European camps three years later. I don’t know how many were children.

Refugees: In Iraq this year, 500,000 people have reportedly been displaced. South Sudanese are fleeing terrorism into Ethiopia; Central African Republic families are walking without food or shelter into Cameroon. It doesn’t take much effort to find accounts of terrible suffering. Almost 2,000 children among those Syrians who are now in Lebanon are said to have severe malnutrition.

Between November 1938, after Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass) in Germany, and 1940, as the Nazis occupied neighboring countries, 10,000 children were saved from almost certain death by being sent to Great Britain with their parents’ blessings in what is known as the kindertransport. Three films have been made about a man named Nicholas Winton, who managed to save 669 Czechoslovakian children by getting them to Britain and finding homes for them there. He is now 105 years old and been knighted by Queen Elizabeth. And there were others.

The president has asked Congress to add $1.4 billion to an existing fund of approximately $9 billion to help house, feed, and transport the unaccompanied children to shelters that the Defense Department has been asked to open in Texas and California until the Office of Refugee Resettlement can begin to figure out what will become of them. Unfortunately, there are Americans who are maleficent enough to charge the Obama administration with causing this crises in order to push through a new, liberal immigration bill. Truly, have they no compassion?

“Oh good,” I said as I cast a glance at my phone on returning to the office on the cusp of Memorial Day weekend. “No one’s called.”

I’d been to Citarella and BookHampton, and was pleased to tell Bill at the bookstore that it was “just as crowded as Citarella,” which was saying something inasmuch as they had six people at Citarella’s registers and still couldn’t keep up with the volume.

“Buy it now cuz it will all be gone by nightfall!” I said to Mayra and Russ once the relative paradise of The Star was regained, adding that the volume of Milton’s poetry I had bought at BookHampton weighed almost as much as the broccoli rabe, onions, garlic, lemons, smoked prosciutto, and avocados I’d bought at Citarella. All but the avocados are to go into the orecchiette I’m making to feed the 5,000 (not really that many) at a family gathering/baby shower tomorrow.

Of course I won’t eat it, being on a low-cholesterol diet, which is to say primarily hummus, yogurt, and oatmeal. Mary force-fed me some chocolate ice cream last night, but otherwise I’ve been clean these past few weeks. I’ve not given up drinking though. In fact I told Mary recently that were I to attend an A.A. meeting, I’d get up and say, “My name is Jack Graves and I still use floppy disks,” which is not quite true, but almost.

Another week and I am not yet saved, though I know everything is saved on my computer, which is good news. I no longer get so tense wondering whether what I’ve written will ever reappear, as if on a page.

Frankly, I had second thoughts about toting to The Star Milton’s complete poetic works, for, as I learned, in thumbing through it, it wasn’t a poem I’d been looking for after all, but a prose work, “Areopagitica,” that might help me better to understand Blake, whom I’m reading about now.

“Oh, I’m reading Milton too!” a woman next to me at the counter said. “Is ‘Paradise Lost’ in it?”

“You want it?” I said, half-seriously, resisting the urge to make an analogy to the Hamptons.

“Actually,” I said to Bill. “I think I’m trying to redeem my failed college education — I’m reading all these poets I was supposed to have read 50 years ago. And now I don’t know if I’ll have the time.”

I asked him if he’d seen, by the way, the article on time in this week’s New Yorker.

“Mary wants very much to read it,” I said, “but she doesn’t know if she’ll ever be able to find the time to!” And with that I was off, with plenty of food and with plenty of food for thought.

Memo to South Fork businesses that raise prices before the arrival the summer hordes: We live here, too.

Seasonal price-gouging is nothing new. The difference between the cost of gasoline here and points west has long been a source of frustration, and even a few shots at legislation. Even ordinary day-to-day things like a lunchtime sandwich come at a premium here. I’ve noticed, too, that prices even at some no-frills, beach-y eateries have reached tourist clip-joint levels. But, at least for me, the higher cost of everything just kind of blends into the South Fork’s background noise.

I was jolted out of my stupor this week by an anonymous letter to the editor that came in over the transom. In neat handwriting, the unknown sender reported that his or her usual quart of fresh-squeezed orange juice had jumped from $10 to $12.99 seemingly overnight. Since the letter was unsigned, it doesn’t seem fair to name the store, and frankly, that would be almost beside the point.

The letter writer reported asking the cashier if the “drought in California or perhaps the weather in Florida” accounted for the sudden increase. “ ‘Oh, no,’ she said, ‘all the store’s prices were raised last week,’ ” the letter continued. “When I asked why, she replied it was done in anticipation of the tourist season.”

The letter is signed: “A supporter of your outstanding  newspaper and a concerned citizen.”

Thinking for a moment: If gas prices were suddenly inflated here the way juice prices are, we would be paying about $5.35 a gallon by the Fourth of July. Surprise, we’re getting off easy at the pump, relatively.

One can understand the temptation from the business owner’s point of view. The busy months are short, landlords charge blisteringly high rents, and, anyway, the summer people appear to have money to burn. Besides, the proletariat can just drink Tropicana. Only it, too, costs a third more out this way.

Well, there’s always water.

The Shelter Island 10K is, and was especially this year, a living symbol of all that is right with America, a country that is not without its faults, but which at its best remains as inspiring as it ever was.

To begin with, there was Meb Kef­lezighi, the first American to have won the Boston Marathon in more than 30 years, a native-born Eritrean whose father brought his children here from that Red Sea country so that they might escape the maw of endless war, so that they would have a chance to be — as Keflezighi told young runners at the Shelter Island School the day before the race — the best they could be.

His dream became reality the day he won Boston, said the very personable champion, who by winning overcame the inevitable restraint of age — he was a 38-year-old up against younger men who had run faster times — and who, by winning there, where deathly bombs had gone off the year before, said in effect that the hope liberty confers cannot be hacked apart by those who hate.

Incredibly, some questioned afterward whether he really were an American, when, in fact, Meb, as he is known, who has been a United States citizen since 1998, is what I would like to think of as quintessentially American, as ambitious for others as for himself, a supreme competitor and uniter.

I see this in Cliff Clark too, the Shelter Island 10K’s founder. A great competitor himself, he understands that ultimately it is both striving and sharing that matter, that we are, indeed, all in this together, and that if this country deteriorates — as, indeed, it sometimes seems to me — into everyone for himself, it will be the end of the game, the end of the dream.

Remember the dead — as Shelter Island did the other day, mourning again a young man, First Lt. Joe Theinert, struck down in Afghanistan four years ago — remember the living, remember and care for one another, and run the good race.

That at its best is America, and that is what I would like to think Meb was thinking as he entered Fiske Field, on his 4 minute and 53 second marathon pace, waving the American flag.

The tale is an infamous one, shared between my family and our oldest, best family friends, the Scrudatos. “The time Thea and Bella ran away at the beach” is what our parents call it; however, I remember the purpose of that unauthorized beach adventure to be something other than an attempted escape out from under our beach umbrellas.

In fact, Thea and I had confirmed with each other that we both would be able to remember which umbrella was ours on the return trip. Such planning and mutual agreement was only too typical for Thea and me, only 5 years old at the time, but long since burgeoned partners in crime.

The event occurred 14 years ago at Atlantic Avenue Beach, at some point in between trips to the “Snack Shack” for Baby Bottle Pops and French fries. I still remember our 5-year-old logic clearly, perhaps because of how much we had to explain ourselves after the fact: We had wanted just to go on a walk. We could not have been running away because we planned on coming back.

There were moments, though, when I was unsure of the walk. When we were moving away from the umbrella, I recall looking back and becoming aware that all the umbrellas actually did look very similar despite what Thea and I had said.

We had gotten far along the beach. All the families’ beach encampments, including ours (the location of which was long forgotten), were dots in the distance behind us. There was just the occasional passer-by, probably skeptical of our parents’ parenting abilities. I vaguely remember someone flying a kite and asking us something, and knowing that we were not supposed to be talking to strangers.

Perhaps he was pointing out our parents to us, because then mine and Thea’s were all out sprinting down the sand and toward us. Maybe the man’s proximity was their specific cause for the running; I believe my parents asked whether I had been speaking to him and I felt some I-should-know-better guilt.

There are two other feelings that I remember having during the “reunion.” While my parents hugged me and expressed mainly just relief, Thea’s parents had already initiated the reprimanding phase. I am sure my parents saw to that as well, but interestingly I do not seem to remember. Anyway, I felt the disciplinary imbalance between Thea and me in that moment, but did not feel bad for her so much as I was nervous to have found that parental panic can sometimes take the form of yelling.

The other thing I remember is wanting to laugh at the fact that there I had been, strolling and appreciating the seaside, at peace, when all of a sudden my parents, in an opposite mental state, emotionally tormented, had come stampeding down the coast like they were storming the Normandy beaches.

Going somewhere without adult supervision, with a friend, is one of the first great privileges that many children experience. It seems that Thea and I believed we were a strong, functional enough unit to bypass our parents’ authority (and inevitable negation), and to decide for ourselves that, yeah, we definitely deserve that privilege, right now. This was not typical behavior for either of us. We did not constantly usurp our parents’ authority. I can think of a few times that we chose not to do something alternative because we anticipated repercussions. Though, according to Thea’s dad, we were and still are “twits.”

Now, it is clear to me that our misjudged decision to take the beach walk was kindled by our desire to spend time together. To each other, we were the person with whom we could imagine going off into the world (the unexplored half of Atlantic Avenue Beach), with whom we could be self-sufficient, and sort of like adults, or at least people with free beach-walking privileges. That is to say, our unorthodox departure from our families’ beach nest was admittedly too soon, but for the record, it felt right because it was with the right person with whom to branch out.

When we got older, we would inform the parents (the “parental unit,” or “P.U.” as ordained by Thea) that we were going on a “lifeguard walk,” which meant that we would walk in between the lifeguard chairs. We took the new stipulations of our walks well, and I remember being monumentally happy to walk with Thea, flop around in the warm sand up by the dunes, and wrap our towels around our heads.

Thea and I met in preschool, when we were 2, and on all accounts, we were inseparable. One particular account, my preschool report, read, “Bella has a special friend with whom she likes to chat and sit on the plastic couch during cleanup, instead of helping out.” Thea’s family received a copy-and-paste of the same statement with her name in place of mine.

The next day at drop-off, our parents found each other in the hall: “Are you the parent of the special friend?” Little did they know, their designated lost-child story to be told and retold would be one that they shared. Little did we know that as Thea left the cafe in which we would say our going-to-college goodbye, she would cock her head and say with, as usual, excellent comedic timing, “Hey, you’ll always be my special friend.”

And even littler did Thea and I know that, as a matter of fact, we were not adult humans during the summers we traipsed about Atlantic Avenue. Rather, we made each other feel that way, as if we were set for life. Thea was the first person who was to me, my partner. We spent only a year together at the same preschool, and have gone to different schools since then. We’ve accrued some more partners along the way, accrued and then let go of others, and still more we’ve accrued, but not really accrued.

It is our special-first-love partnership, however, that is an untouchable accrual, sealed forever, spanning from days when we would write cards to the parental unit as a tactic to secure a sleepover that night, to now, when we text each other to make plans, without consulting the P.U. at all.

Bella Lewis is an intern at The Star this summer.

Two things have greatly improved the way we eat at the Rattray house this spring. First, warmer weather brought the garden to life and helped encourage me to get out on the water to fish and clam. The other is that after talking for years about signing up for weekly produce with one of the community-supported agriculture ventures that have popped up here, we joined Amber Waves.

Four weeks in, and we are already feeling healthier. Tuesday’s food box, for example, contained kale, chard, radishes, lettuce, and baby turnips so sweet you could eat them raw. Parsley, which grows strongly in the cool mists of late spring, has also been supplied, which dovetails nicely with the half-bushel of clams I dug from a favorite spot after last Thursday’s editorial meeting.

I had planned to go digging with a friend that afternoon, but his work interfered, so I went alone, running the boat out to the flat just as the tide went slack. In a moderate east wind and under an overcast sky, a lone bayman was scratching far offshore. I gave him plenty of room, anchoring the boat about a quarter of a mile down the beach before jumping off on the leeward side with my rake and basket.

It was relatively easy going; a soft sandy bottom with few rocks gave up half a bushel of chowders with a couple of Little Necks and an oyster for good measure in less than an hour. The bayman was still hard at it when I climbed back aboard and headed to the dock. I wondered what he had been thinking about out there for the duration of the tide — probably about the same as I had, which is to say, not much.

The kids like clams well enough as long as they are prepared no other way than stuffed and baked or in chowder, so Lisa and I pretty much had the linguini alle vongole with a fat handful of chopped parsley from the box to ourselves the first night.

By the second night, I succumbed, mixing chopped clams with panko crumbs, sauteed garlic and onion, and olive oil, then spooning the mixture into opened shells and running them under the broiler to brown. The dozen or so I prepared were not enough, however, so there were complaints when the last one was spoken for.