I had mussels for the first time at Granville Moore’s, an unassumingly wonderful Belgian restaurant on H Street in DC.  I regret now that I was put off by the Moules Marinere and instead had a salad.  Since moving to Ann Arbor, however, I have seen the error of my ways, embracing The Earle’s mussels as the best and most affordable happy hour dinner in town.

I added shellfish to my 25 Recipes list with mussels specifically in mind. They’re not difficult to make at all, but the whole live in the shell thing had me intimidated.

Other than the debearding, the recipe (from another excellent Belgian restaurant in DC) was a piece of cake: maybe 20 minutes from the start of prep to the delivery of steaming bowls of PEI mussels to the table.

My one issue with the recipe was that it called for a pound of mussels per person – so I doubled it to serve two. Now, when we go to The Earle, we usually share two dozen mussels. Two pounds and two dozen are very different numbers – in fact, we each had around 1.5 dozen mussels each, with nearly two dozen left over. We’ll definitely make this recipe again, but won’t bother doubling it.

Recipe:
Provençal Mussels with Tomato, Garlic, Capers, and Basil from Robert Wiedmaier of Brasserie Beck