Here’s another meal you can make in 15 minutes with just five ingredients (in addition to salt, pepper, and basic cooking fats): mussels with a delicious, aromatic sauce of white wine and herbs or Moules à la Marinière, if you want to get all French about it. The dish is as elegant as it is simple, and the combination of flavors –wine, herbs, butter, the sea– is magic.
I like to serve this with buttered toast (to soak up the delicious sauce) followed by a simple green salad. Add a crisp white wine during dinner and a scoop of sorbet at the end, and you’ve got a memorably tasty meal that nobody would guess took you less time to make that I took to find my phone this morning.
Recipe
(for two)
Ingredients
About 2 pounds of fresh mussels (in their shells)
1 cup of dry white wine
About 6 scallions
A spring of fresh thyme
A bunch of flat-leaf parsley, divided
3 tablespoons of butter
salt and pepper
Instructions
0:00
Carefully wash the mussels in cold water to remove all slime and sand, and examine them one by one. Discard any specimens that are broken, loose at the hinge or otherwise funky and remove any remaining “beards” protruding from the shells by giving them a firm tug. Wash the parsley, thyme and scallions. Set aside three parsley springs and roughly chop up a handful from the remaining bunch. Chop the scallions finely, using the white and light green parts only.
5:00
Pour the wine in to a pot (large enough to hold all of the mussels) and add the scallions, parsley, thyme, butter and add several good grinds of black pepper. Boil for about 3 minutes to tame the alcohol and reduce the sauce a bit. Enjoy the intoxicating aroma.
10:00
Add the mussels to the pot. Cook over high heat for 3-5 minutes or until they open, gently stirring the mussels around once with a wooden spoon.
12:00
Make some toast.
15:00
Spoon the opened mussels into soup plates, picking out and discarding the whole herbs. Then taste the sauce for salt (it probably won’t’ need any) and ladle it over the shellfish. (Don’t pour the sauce directly from the pot into the bowls incase there is some sand lingering on the bottom.)
Serve immediately with buttered toast.
