Chilli mussels

Chilli mussels

I have actually had this on my meal plan for the last 2 weeks and only tonight did I get around to trying it. I wish I had tried it sooner because its fabulous! The only reason I hadn't is because I can never seem to get mussels on our online grocery order, and they are something I would rather buy just before I am going to use them. So this afternoon when I finished work I popped to the supermarket and got some mussels.

The hardest thing about the entire dish was giving the mussels a scrub and debearding them. Hardest as in time consuming - but it really only took me about 10 minutes, probably even less. I had just over a kilo of mussels, so I spread them in the varoma, using both the dish and the tray so they would cook evenly. I added all the ingredients to the bowl, put the varoma in position and left it to do its thing. A mere 12 minutes later I checked and they were done!

Chilli mussels ready for steaming in the varoma

I don't like super hot chillies, so I used 2 long red chillies and removed most of the seeds and membranes, but left a few in so there was a little heat. I didn't have any white wine, so I added a little extra water, but it could probably do without that since the sauce is quite runny in the end.

The mussels were lovely with a few slices of tiger loaf to mop up the sauce at the end. We actually ate the mussels between 2 of us, so we were left with quite a bit of sauce. I'm not sure if you could really use it for much, maybe if you wanted to do more mussels the next day, or it might be nice to reduce it and serve it with some other seafood or even use it as a pasta sauce for marinara.

Happy thermomixing!