When I lived in Tillamook, I used to run them through the old hand turn meat grinder, sautee them and throw them in chowder. To keep from crunching them while digging, we'd put a short dowel on the neck (down the hole) and dig beside the dowel, down to the end of the dowel. If you know how long the dowel is, you knew how far down they were by how much dowel was left on top.