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.

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!