Buttery mussels

I was so happy yesterday…the start of the weekend. I was planning to do absolutely noting, but this morning I suddenly had the urge to clean up my little “storage” room. First we took out all of the stuff, man it was a lot! Then I vacuum cleaned it and dusted every off. We had to sort out what we wanted to keep and then put everything back. I think that was the hard part…throwing stuff away. Cuz what if I might need it some day. I guess this was why the room was so packed we couldn’t even find anything there anymore. So I pulled myself together and threw everything out that I haven’t looked at since it moved to the storage room. It took us about half a day to do this and now the room is still packed, but better organized. At least now we can find our stuff, if needed.

After that was done I got the brilliant idea of cleaning out my kitchen cupboards. That took the other half of the day so you can imagine that dinner was quite quick. But hey, before all 7 cupboards were packed and now I filled 6 and have one empty one left! Time to go shopping for some more baking stuff to fill out the empty space (don’t tell my hubby, he’ll freak out)!

Anyway since dinner was so good I thought I’d share this super simple, yet fantastic mussel recipe.

All you need is alot of mussels, butter, garlic and some fresh chilies.

I rinsed and cleaned about 4 kilo mussels. Although I don’t like to waste food, it is not a good idea to eat the mussels that are cracked or open and don’t want to close after you tap them. So I threw those out. Some mussels had a “beard” so I ripped that off as well. Not so jummie.

The butter (use as much or as little as you want, it will all taste good) and the fresh chilies (again as much as you prefer) went into a pot.

Then after the butter has melted and the chilies turned it slightly red, I added some crushed garlic.

Let it all infuse a little, so don’t put the fire too high. When the garlic starts to brown I added the mussels. My pot wasn’t big enough for 4 kilo at one time so I had to make 2 batches. The moment they went in I tossed them a bit and put the lid on and the fire on high.

After a few minutes they started to open up. Once every mussel is open I added some parsley (just because I could get it fresh out of my neighbor's garden, thanks Georgia) and served it.

Some people use an empty shell to eat mussels, but we didn’t, except for this picture. It was so good the only appropriate way to eat it was with our hands. We love our mussels with some garlic sauce.

Since there was no way we could finish 4 kilos I removed all the shells and kept the mussels in the juice. This would be a great broth for clam/mussel chowder. To be continued tomorrow =)

Ps: sorry the pictures are not as clear as I would like them to be. The cleaning must have worn me out so I couldn’t keep the camera still. Or maybe it is just time for a new camera…

Hope your weekend is more relaxed then mine so far!