Recipe: Garlic Butter Mussels

There are many ways to buy seafood in Midland, which is far from the sea.  The regular Meijer and Walmart supermarkets and some smaller grocery shops around.  Then there's also the seafood truck that comes every other week or so.  They'll send you an email to announce their schedule or you can also follow their whereabouts on Facebook.  I often visit the seafood truck because they have better variety, prices, and you can make special orders since the proprietor in the truck is the guy who orders from his suppliers in California, Boston, Alaska and other seafood hubs.  Even the regular items available are different than what I can get from the supermarkets here - tuna saku block (great for searing on all sides tataki style), squids, chilean sea bass, saba mackerel ready for the grill and other less standard American dinner table fare.

The come just before lunch and stay until early afternoon.  Fortunately Midland is very small so I can very well grab lunch, shop at the truck, drop my purchases home before returning to the office in just under one hour.  Sometimes I even swing by the dry cleaners if I want to be really productive during lunch.  Pretty cool.

Oceanside Seafood truck.

Here's a recipe for cooking either fresh or half shell mussels.  This can be easily varied with other shellfish like clams.

Ingredients
2 lbs/1kg of mussels - either in whole or on half shells like what I have
3 cloves of garlic, diced
1 tablespoon dried parsley or fresh if you have them
2 tablespoons of butter
1 6.32oz bottle of chardonnay
1 teaspoon salt/to taste
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon corn starch stirred in 3 tablespoon water.

1. Heat olive oil in pan - add garlic and parsley and cook until fragrant and not browned.
2. Add mussels and wine to pan.  Cover and bring to boil.  About 8 minutes or so.
3. If you've used whole fresh mussels, remove those that did not open.  They're bad.
4. Remove mussels with a slotted or sieve ladle into serving dish.  Set aside.
5. Add salt, butter and cornstarch in water to the sauce in the pan - stir well until thicken.
6. Bring to boil, taste and adjust saltiness, and then pour sauce over mussels.  Serve with sliced bread.

I buy these for use in cooking.  I take a swig and use the rest of
each bottle for whatever recipe calls for white wine.

The bread in the background was freshly baked by Leon.
Even though not the crusty type that's best for this dish, it was deliciously fresh and tasty.