mussels Archives - Mamma's Cooking

Mussels for your New Year’s Celebration

An easy, festive and light idea for your New Year’s Eve celebration is a big pot of mussels! All you need along side it is a good loaf of crusty bread. You can accomplish that with gluten free bread by toasting it and it is just as good to dip it into the broth! You will soon have a bowl of empty shells.

Mussels with White Balsamic Broth

Ingredients

1 Tablespoon olive oil

1/2 cup of diced white onion

2 cloves of garlic, minced

2 pounds of mussels, cleaned

3 Tablespoons of white balsamic vinegar

1 1/2 to 2 cups of chicken or vegetable broth

handful of fresh cilantro or basil, torn

Directions

Heat olive oil in medium sized pot. Cook onions and garlic in oil for a couple of minutes. Add mussels and stir. Add remaining ingredients, stir and cover for about 10-15 minutes, or until all the mussels are open. If a mussel doesn’t open, discard it. Toss with cilantro and serve.

With all the holiday festivities, heavy food and sweets turning toward lighter but still delicious feasts are welcome! What are you serving for New Years?

Happy 100th Birthday to Julia Child!

Next Wednesday, August 15, 2012 marks the date that would have been JuliaChild’s 100^th birthday. Restaurants around the country are doingspecial menus to honor Julia Child. PBS has lots of specials on TV among otherfun things on their website. Cooks and Bloggers around the country are writingand cooking to honor her memory. Here is one with 8 ideas on how to honor Julia from Robin Shreeves at the Mother Nature Network. I am going to try to make one recipe a daynext week from one of her cookbooks to honor her legacy. The French Chef was the first cooking show Iwatched on TV growing up. We watched a lot of PBS. She pioneered the era of cooking shows whichhas now exploded with popularity to a point I’m sure she probably couldn’t evenhave imagined. We all like to pretend we are cooking on a cooking show in thekitchen (don’t tell me you have never done it!) while making a meal and veryfew of us will ever get the chance to, but she made gourmet cooking accessibleto home cooks.

I have been reviewing Julie Child recipes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking to find some easyones and maybe one challenging one to make this week. If you are bored with your regular weeklymeals, picking a theme and sticking to it one week a month or however often youhave the energy for, can help spice things up (pun intended)! Or choose one night a week to make a newrecipe or make one of those hundreds you have pinned on Pinterest.

Pick a Julia Child recipe to make this week inhonor of what would have been her 100^th birthday. Don’t beintimidated. You don’t have to pick sweet breads or duck, or a fancy multi-step,multi-ingredient recipe. Make a quiche, roast chicken, pork chops, boiledartichokes or buttered green beans. It’s still a Julia Child recipe. Her goalwas to make gourmet cooking accessible to home cooks.

These are some of the recipes I’m hoping to make this week:

Chocolate Almond Cake, p677. Supposedly one Julia’sfavorites.

Boeuf Bourguignon, p.315. I’ve never made it and think Iwill while watching Julie and Julia.

Potato Leek Soup, p.37. One of my favorites. I’ve never madeJulia’s recipe though.

Quiche au fruits de mer, p.149. Sounds really fancy, butreally is just eggs, shallots or onions, butter (of course), lobster, shrimp orcrab, cheese, cream, tomato paste, salt and pepper. She also adds Madeira ordry vermouth, but I don’t have those and don’t usually by whole bottles ofthings for a couple of tablespoons, so I’ll use something else like whitebalsamic vinegar. I might even buy the crust. Shhh…don’t tell.

Crepes, p.190. These are just fancy pancakes that my kidswill hopefully love!

Moules A La Mariniere, p. 227. This is one of the onlyrecipes that I am repeating. I’ve made it before and loved it!

Poulets Grilles a la diable (Chicken Broiled with Mustard,Herbs, and Bread Crumbs), p.265. I chose this recipe because I already haveeverything for this in the house! It is similar to how I usually make chicken,but with basting. I don’t usually baste. Maybe I’ll do it, if I can stop thetwins from reaching into the oven.

Roasted Pork marinated in Marinade Simple (Lemon Juice andHerb Marinade), p.376. I also chose this one because I have most of the ingredients.

Artichauts au Naturel (whole boiled artichokes), p. 424. Probablythe easiest of the recipes. We’ll see what the kids think of these.

I’ll probably pick a couple other vegetable recipes too.

If you don’t want to cook, go out and have some oysters anda glass of champagne and have a toast to Julia Child!

#CookforJulia

Happy New Year! I’m back…

As I suspected, once I started my full time job, on top of being a full time mom, the blogging kind of took a backseat. The cooking also has. I have been cooking on weekends and we survive on leftovers until Wednesdays, then Thursdays and Fridays are either pasta, chicken fingers or fish sticks with sweet potato fries or takeout 🙂

On the weekends I have been cooking 3 large meals. One on Saturday (like mac-n-cheese), then on Sunday while I’m making dinner I make 2 meals (like a pot roast in the slow cooker with mashed potatoes and squash and then turkey chili on the stove). One meal for Sunday and one for Monday night. This also helps because then we have ready made leftovers to bring for lunch through Wednesday or so.

This takes a lot of planning so I have been planning on Saturday and then shopping either Saturday or Sunday for the week. I am looking into grocery delivery services to make this easier.

My news resolution is to try to keep writing as much as possible about what I’m cooking for our family.

Last night for our New Year’s Eve dinner I made potato leek soup and moules marinieres. The soup is made in a similar process to my butternut squash soup. This is not a healthy soup, but is soooo good. Melt 1/2 cup of butter in soup pot. Then saute 1/2 medium size onion with 2 large leeks and about a tablespoon of garlic. Add salt, pepper and some fresh thyme to taste. Once onions and leeks are soft, about 10-15 minutes, add about 1/4 – 1/3 cup white balsamic vinegar and let that reduce. Then add about 5-6 small yukon gold potatoes (sliced thinly). Add more salt and pepper to taste. Stir and let cook for about 5 minutes. Then add about 8 cups of chicken stock (or veggie stock if you are making it vegetarian). Let this cook for about 30-40 minutes. Once potatoes are soft, take off heat and use immersion blender to make a smooth thick soup! Add more seasoning if needed and more stock if too thick.

The moules marinieres are simple and not bad on the budget. Melt 2 tablespoons of butter in a deep saute pan that has a lid. Saute 2-3 chopped green onions (the white parts, save green for topping once finished) and 1 Tablespoon of garlic. Then add in 1/4 cup white balsamic vinegar, 1/8 cut white wine vinegar and 1 cup of chicken stock. Let this reduce by 1/2 (about 10-15 minutes). Add 1 lb of mussels (which have been cleaned and debearded. Let them soak in cold water for about 20 minutes to let the sand fall out). Cover and cook for about 10 minutes. When all open (or most and discard the closed) serve with crusty bread!

Happy New Year and happy cooking!