Five Quick Ones

Food Heaven

I cooked mussels for lunch yesterday. It's from a two-pack bag of pre-cooked bivalves from Wal-Mart. The package displayed a recipe for Mussels Magnifico on one side.

I love mussels but remember cooking them only once before. That was in the early 1980s, from a bag of fresh, bearded mussels I bought at Joe O'Malia's (now part of the Marsh chain). I had to scrub the mussels, remove the beards and allow them to regurgitate their last meal in water for a couple of hours. The Wal-Mart packet is convenience par excellence. The mussels are already cooked and separately vacuum-packed in thick plastic envelopes that I just heated up in the microwave. Cooking shellfish should be this easy!

The mussel meal I remember best was one my sister and I ate at Cap'n Jack's Restaurant in Orlando some 15 years ago. The restaurant was by the side of the lake at the mass of shops and restaurants called Disney Downtown. We had a corner table next to the black wrought-iron grill separating us from the water below. Ambiance, I am sure, played a big part why that meal was so memorable. The shellfish, black on the outside with iridescent pearl and purple insides reclined on a bed of al dente linguini fragrant with garlic and white wine.

What I fixed yesterday was almost as good as the memory and memories as you know are hard to beat. I resisted the impulse to modify the recipe until the very last stages. I didn't trust a dish with just onions, garlic and white wine with no other herbs and spices. I used fresh Roma tomatoes that I cubed without removing the skin. I had a tube of  concentrato di pomodoro con verdure I bought in Sorrento last May. Adding a cup of chardonnay made the dish too soupy for me. Instead of simmering it gently I boiled it down until it got saucy. That emendation made it perfect for topping Italian-produced linguini cooked perfectly al dente.
The result was perfection! Ambiance might count for much in memories but in the making of new memories freshly prepared dishes rise to the top of the list. I was surprised that with no other herbs like oregano or thyme the dish was so tasty. In fact the simple preparation brought out the taste of the fresh tomatoes made darker and complex by the pomodoro concentrate. I also used plain curly parsley instead of Italian parsley but the lunch experience joins other memories in my food heaven!