Foodie Fridays: Mussels, not

Our family's love for mussels more or less started in France, where we discovered that Junior J loved his mussels and could eat a whole load of them. For some strange reason, he'd only eat the female ones, which were orange-pink in colour, leaving the lighter-coloured males for us.

When we were in Bordeaux, mussels were pretty cheap at the market, so we tried our hand at cooking them ourselves (here's one recipe you could try). It was such a hit that we had home-cooked mussels twice, with loads of crispy baguette to soak up the sauce.

Its pretty simple to prepare, since you just need to fry the butter with the veggies and add the mussels in. However, the cleaning bit can be a little tedious, since you have to de-beard all of them and give them a scrubbing before they go in the pot to cook. Even all that cleaning didn't deter the hubby, and he came back last weekend armed with a pack of mussels from the market. We put them in the fridge as usual, and left them for the next day.

Now the thing is, mussels are supposed to be eaten fresh, and must be alive when you cook them. Most sites that we've read recommended the tap test to see if the mussels are living: you just need to knock an open mussel gently on the side of the counter and see if it closes within a few minutes. If the mussel doesn't close, the poor fellow is dead, and you're supposed to chuck them.

I soaked the mussels the next day in cool water, to allow them to filter off all the sand inside. When the hubby got down to cooking them after that, he noticed that most of the mussels were open. So we did the tap test. And they all didn't close. Uhoh.

We couldn't bear to throw that whole pack out, so the hubby decided he'll just cook them anyway, while I went hunting online for reasons why we shouldn't eat dead mussels and what would happen if we did. There was a lot of discussion about how it was a myth that you shouldn't eat mussels that are not open after cooking (apparently it was ok to eat those that are still closed, provided they were still alive prior to cooking, and cooked for an adequate amount of time)... but hardly anything about what happens to you if you ate mussels that didn't close before cooking.

Then I came across this page, which mentioned scary stuff like "paralytic shellfish poisoning". The page didn't seem too scientific, and there were no references cited, and the mussels seemed ok. But I think being parents does make you paranoid, so we opted to chuck the whole lot out just to be safe, and ate a rather mish-mash dinner that we hastily put together. There was no way I was going to add food-poisoning to the list of ailments we were already having!

I guess we should have remembered to open the package to give the mussels air when we placed them in the fridge. One thing that puzzles me, however, was that the mussels were packaged two days before in a plastic container that was sealed with clingflim, and had a expiry date that was a few days away from the day we cooked them. There was no instructions save to keep them below 7 degrees. Wouldn't those fellows have died even before they made it to the market, since the packaging was air-tight? Whatever the case, we're buying fresh, unpackaged mussels from the market from now on.

Now how about you? Have you tried cooking mussels? Would you have chucked out the whole pot of them if you were in our shoes?

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