Mussel soup

With all the excitement of receiving the awards and to share it with some of my favorite bloggers I didn’t had to chance to share my mussel soup recipe. Remember on Saturday I bought 4 kilo mussels and saved the juice? Well the day after I cooked soup with it. At first I wanted to make chowder, but this soup didn’t look anything close to the chowders I had before, so this is just mussel soup.

For this soup I basically used whatever I had at hand.  

I started with sautéing some cubed chorizo sausage and one onion in some olive oil.

I like them nice and brown and could eat them just like this on some bread so I had to pull myself together and move on.

The next thing I had to do is to chop/cube lots of veggies. I used some potatoes, carrots and celery stalks. And the all went into the pot with the chorizo. I stirred it around for a bit and then added one tablespoon of flour. Later I found out that that one tablespoon wasn’t really enough to thicken the soup, so note to myself…next time add 2 tablespoons.

Before I added the mussel juice I scooped all the mussels out and set them aside. Since I plan to cook the soup for quite some time I didn’t want to overcook the mussels. And I noticed that there was quite a bit of sand and pieces of shell on the bottom so I carefully poured the juice out. After it boiled I had a taste and because it was quite salty I added some water.

I still had a bit of homemade pasta sauce (with fresh tomatoes, onions, garlic and eggplant) left so that went in. It was about 3 tablespoons. And I had just a tiny bit of cod in the freezer so I added that as well. I’ve found some gorgonzola cheese that had to be eaten so I put a bit of that in the soup. Last but not least the mussels went in. The result was a very tasty soup.

I topped it with some bacon bits and served it piping hot.

It might not be the chowder I intended to make, but it was darn tasty.