The plan was to do a seafood boil for the night of my birthday, but that day came and went and I only discovered last week that the market in the quay sells a fresh stock of assorted live seafood. I got a pound each of mussels and clams and got to soaking, scrubbing and debearding the odd creatures:
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| Bay mussels left, Manila clams right |
We also grabbed a loaf of crusty bread and some salad ingredients. I couldn't decide if I wanted to go with a spicy coconut broth or a more traditional cajun style, so I did both!
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| With sweet corn and Yukon golds over a spicy cajun coconut broth. |
Next time I'll add sausage and either spot prawns or dungeness crab for other diners, but I had a ball picking the sweet fatties out of their shells and dunking my bread in the fragrant broth. Surprisingly, all of the mussels survived my debearding (apparently if you pull it out wrong it can decapitate the little guys inside. . . wait, decapitate? Do they even have heads?).
The salad on the side is pears, romaine and mango slices in a honey-lime vinaigrette. Simple, yes, but it opened my eyes to the joy of fresh lime juice on mango.
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| Hey buddy. |
And it didn't take long for everything to be om'nom'ed up.
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| Fin. |
