Recently I have moved to a new place. And with a new place also comes new supermarkets and stuff that is worth experimenting with. Because of soft lockdowns is is also time to experiment with some new receipes again. Well receipes. More the find some ingredients which you like kind of style, and see what you can mix them up with! Some times you end up with a winner, some times it isn't all that enthusiastic.
This time: a winner!
Mussels Asian style!
When you ask a Dutchy for a typical Dutch receipe for mussels, it will always be we a bag of soupveggies ("because already pre cut and that is so easy") and boiling in either white wine of in beer.
In Asian style mussels you leave these out of it. Time for a different approach!
- For two people about 2 kilo of mussels is enough. Rinse them thouroughly under running water and see if they are all closed. If they aren't, see if tapping on them works. If they don't close, discard them. Also discard the shells with cracks of missing pieces in there.
- Dice a decent amount of onion, springonion and garlic. Every base starts with this.
- Chop peppers to the amount of heat that you want. We have little habaneros in there because heat is a commonly used thing in our house.
- Have cilantro, a lime and samphire on the side for tossing in later on. Samphire is a type of seaweed which is easily bought nowadays. It looks like little branches.
- Use a big wok, or when you don't have one like me. Take a big stirfrying pan, and make the base and in two phases you cook the mussels.
- The base starts with heating some vegetable oil. So bo boiling white wine or beer in there. Oil this time, we are stirfrying the mussels.
- When the oil is warm enough, add in your onions, garlic and habanero.
- Squeeze in some lime juice. Add in the samphire. Because of the salt from the ocean on the samphire, you really really don't need to add any extra.
- Add in the springonions
- This is your base. From here on you can toss in as many mussels as you want.
Throw in the bad boys!
- So toss in you mussels and stir them good in the hot mixture without breaking the shells. Cover the pan with a lid for about two minutes.
- Under the lid you can now see the mussels opening up from the heat and steam. This should happen. If a mussels doesn't open, don't eat it. Like really, that can give you serious food poisening.
- In a total of 5 minutes cooking your mussels will be ready. You can take the pan of or the fire and just put it on the table.
- Toss over additional lime juice and cilantro leaves.
- Use one clam to take out the meat of the other mussels. We call this the clamperdeyclam and this is the big winner ;) Also take one cilantro leave every time when taking the meat of a mussel
So that is it! Hardly and ingredients and especially no fancy ingredients. But this is really something different in taste and it take literally 10 minutes of preparation time. Enjoy!