Steamed Mussels in White Wine

A few weekends ago, Taylor and I got a culinary creative urge and tried our hand at making steamed mussels. We were inspired by a friend of ours (Andy) to check out a huge Korean grocery store called H-Mart. It's quite the unusual place in the middle of suburban Dallas, but man is it a cool store!

They have tons of fresh produce (lots of fruits and veggies that we'd never even seen before), and long aisles of all different kinds of specialty Asian foods (okay, there's a good portion of everyday stuff like rice and cereal, but there were tons of things we didn't recognize and almost everything was in packaging that we couldn't read!). If you're ever wanting to try to make sushi at home...this is the place to go. They have an entire aisle dedicated to all the sushi fixins (we are still in Texas of course): dozens of different kinds of dried seaweed, bottles of wasabi, every type of sesame seed imaginable....and then you get to the fresh fish section. Taylor looked longingly at the huge case of fresh sushi-grade pieces of fish for a good five minutes before agreeing to stick to our original plan of purchasing mussels.

The fish section is amazing in itself. Do you have a crazy rare type of fish that you love to eat out but can't find it in supermarkets anywhere? It's in this store. I promise. They have everything from Cuttlefish to Crawfish...and if you happen to be looking for a Monkfish head...they have those too! Insane.

So we bought 2lbs of fresh mussels (for $2.99 I might add!), garlic, shallots, and headed home.

We were mainly sticking to this FoodNetwork recipe by Bobby Flay, but we did improvise just a little bit. Here are the ingredients:

Plus a little olive oil, butter, and salt & pepper. Doesn't get much easier than that!

Now on to the process:

• Put the mussels into a strainer and throw away any that are already open. We found that out of our 2lb bag, we ended up having to throw away about a third of the mussels. A little sad, but there were a lot left. 
• Once you're left with perfect mussels, scrub the outsides until they're clean. This was semi-difficult because I didn't know what to scrub them with! I used my hands and ended up just rubbing them down very well under cold running water. 
• A yummy loaf of French bread is a must with this meal. Take a minute to prep the bread before everything gets cooking because once you start it goes fast and this meal is definitely better hot! (Cutting a few pieces of bread into a heart shape is optional :) - Taylor always does this when he's cutting up a baguette for us!)

• Let the mussels sit for a minute and cut up the shallots and garlic and add to a large pot. Like the recipe says, I would use two shallots and two cloves of garlic. We used double the shallots and it was very very onion-y!
• Stir in 2 cups of white wine (we used a Robert Hall Chardonnay), and a few tablespoons of olive oil. 
• Let the onions, garlic, wine, olive oil, and S&P cook for a few minutes until it starts boiling. 

• Once boiling, add in the mussels and cover the pot. Let the mussels cook for about 6-7 minutes. This is the important part. I wanted to make sure they were cooked so I waited a full 8 minutes and a few of them tasted slightly over-done.

• Using a slotted spoon, take out the mussels and put them in a bowl. If there are any that didn't open, throw them out. 

• There will be a lot of juice left in the bottom of the pot. Stir in a little butter and then pour the juice over the mussels.
• Enjoy!