You might not believe me, but there’s nothing fancy about this meal. Mussels are about the easiest thing in the world to cook. They don’t require anything fancy like filleting fish, and even making a sauce is completely optional. Served with some crusty bread, or something to soak up the salty mussel juices, and a green salad, you’ll be laughing at anyone who ever thought these mollusks were peasant food.
So I had a few people over for dinner. Threw a baking sheet of whole Jerusalem artichokes with some unpeeled cloves of garlic and chopped sweet potatoes and leeks in the oven, and started washing mussels. You don’t even need to scrub them hard because they’re farmed and are already pretty clean. So all you really have to do is tap the open ones to close them (if they don’t close throw them out – I ended up throwing out about 8, which is really not good…I forgot to check the harvest date on the bag, against my cookbook’s author’s advice…but most of them were just fine). I bought Iles-de-la-Madeleine mussels because I’d heard from a respected seafood chef once they were miles better than Newfoundland mussels, which are usually the only option at the grocery store. These I found at La Mer but any respecting seafood shop in Quebec should carry them in season. They’re all farmed and completely sustainable, and the price is just about the same – usually around $2 per pound. That’s ridiculously good, isn’t it? You could get 8 pounds of mussels for $16! That’s enough for about 6 people! Try doing that with any other kind of fish or seafood (even clams, though some aren’t bad). And what that actually means is the mussel farmers are getting paid probably around $1 per pound, which is next to nothing.
They’re really easy to raise, and after trying the Iles-de-la-Madeleine mussels for the first time, I think they’re generally plumper and maybe a little less salty, but I also didn’t soak up too much of the juice since I’m mostly off bread right now. It was delicious soaking into my sweet potatoes, though. I adapted the recipe from “Good Fish” by Becky Selengut, which is a sustainable seafood cookbook. At the beginning of the chapter on mussels she instructs on how to choose mussels, how to store them, the different kinds (species names), and just about everything you’d ever need to know about mussels all concisely summed up in one page. Super helpful.
The only reason I adapted the recipe was because I didn’t have any apple cider or any apple juice. I had apple cider vinegar and amazing organic spartan apples. They worked just fine since I was careful with the vinegar. They worked really well, actually. I also didn’t have clam juice. These things only really matter if you want a ridiculously flavourful mussel juice for that aforementioned bread. I liked the volume provided by two diced apples instead.
“Pulling off the beards” just means pulling off the stringy bits sticking out of the mussels. And the easiest way to clean them is in a large bowl of cold water. You can even do this in advance, and then drain the bowl and cover the mussels with a damp paper towel to store in the fridge while you prep the rest of the dish. And the only other thing you might want to know is how to physically eat them. Pick up the first one with your hands, pull it open to get at the mussel with your teeth (or a fork if you’re in that sort of company), and then use your first empty mussel shell as a kind of pincer or tweezers to get all the subsequent mussels out of their shells. It’s neat and quick, and you can also use the empty shell as a spoon to scoop up the mussel juices at the bottom of the bowl. Oh, right, serve mussels in a bowl with their juices, and have a big empty bowl or pot on the table into which you can toss the empty shells.
Here’s how it went:
Prepped ingredients
Mussels in the pot topped with apples
No more mussels (there isn’t supposed to be a picture here…)
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