Mussels in Cider
Every millennial has a magazine she misses so, so, so much, but believe me that I miss them more. I love(d) the newsstand section of the bookstore with hundreds of titles both for me and not I assumed I’d work in magazine publishing as an adult, a job that more or less stopped existing during the four years I spent in college.* Teen mags, shelter rags, aspirational cooking monthlies: I loved them all and I’m sure like, 99% of people who read my blog have several they’re nostalgic for.
My favorite dead magazine is Ready Made, a combo lifestyle/décor/cooking/hipster culture/DIY setup that was, somehow, out of Iowa, I think. It had a waste not-want not aesthetic that wasn’t based in denial or overly demonstrative environmental piety but instead was irreverent and fun. I was still a little younger than their target demographic, which, for me, gave it a “hints from your cool older cousin” appeal.
To this day, I have no money but a lot of taste, so there remains a Ready Made-shaped hole in my heart. The column I miss the most these days was called something like Cooking for One, by Jane Marie, and it had a pretty straightforward, non-depressing, very delicious single-serve recipe every month. I still make her panzanella for one to this day!
One of her columns, presumably written when short on time, was a guide for divorcee dinner, a term she coined for the adult lunchable she’d make herself when eating alone and lacking the will to really make-make food. It consisted of selections from the bits bin of the cheese counter at Whole Foods, the nice olives, Marcona almonds, and some sliced up seasonal fruit along with a demi baguette. My friend Becca and I loved divorcee dinner, which got us through our respective graduate programs and the early years of adulthood. She’s now married and has a kid, making this a much more expensive, arduous, and therefore, less appealing option for a quick weeknight meal.
A couple months ago, she had a rare night to herself and I asked what she was making.
“Divorcee dinner!” she said with evident glee. “Oh.” A long pause. “Should we start calling this something else?”
She is a pediatrician and thus probably overly nice, though in her defense, I am an absolute loon so it probably makes sense to tread lightly in many situations.
“Well, we can’t rename everything, and now I can start calling the scraps bin the “dead soldier bowl” again so let’s just let this one stand.”
So while divorcee dinner is still some triple creme brie, a little Humbolt fog, and ten-year gouda, I guess everything I make is technically divorcee dinner, since I am
divorced
cooking for one person
The problem for cooking for one person is that I don’t want to eat the same thing for eight consecutive meals and things that feel special don’t typically keep that well. It’s not very fun to have a week of tuna-noodle casserole and not just because it’s gross, and it’s physically impossible for me to just throw away food, especially if it’s fancy. Plus, part of the joy of cooking is when everyone agrees it’s delicious, and since I have no designs on introducing my dogs to the joys of country ham, that results in me just talking to myself. It’s just really hard to motivate yourself to make something that feels “wow” when it’s only you.
Enter mussels. They are a perfect entry-level cooking dish because they take like, five entire minutes to prepare and they let you know when they’re done, like gnocchi or a toddler who has eaten three (3) green peas. I’ve typically made mussels with not-great white wine, but Nigella’s recipe calls for cider. Conveniently, I had opened one the day before that was just meh, so I reserved it and voila! This is a perfect dish for one person, plus it comes together so fast, and in my experience as a person prone to depression, this is clutch because you don’t have to convince yourself you’re worth it if there’s basically no effort at all. I opted to make these mussels on a day when I had gotten some bad news and felt like shit and wow, was it ever a salve for my wounds. I didn’t have to make a herculean effort to really gas myself up. Crucially, it’s easy to scale up: just get more mussels and a bigger pot if you’re really hungry or have guests.
Before we skip to the recipe, may I make a plea for having A Guy? A Guy doesn’t have to be a man, but A Guy does have to know what he’s talking about. I truly believe having A Guy is the secret to living a good life. I have a shoe repair Guy, a Guy for real estate advice, and, relevant to this, a seafood Guy. Whenever I move, whether that’s continents or neighborhoods, my first order of business is finding The Guys. I cannot rest until I do and this can take weeks since I have up to and including five dozen Guys at any given time. Once I find them, I am unstoppable. I don’t shop around for bargains. I don’t try on other stuff for size. I find The Guy and am intensely loyal and I recommend The Guy to everyone I meet.
My seafood Guy, who is named Mike, is the best. He will lay aside something nice for me if I call ahead, he won’t let me buy stuff he doesn’t think is good, and I will bet a million dollars of someone else’s money that he’d special order as much paddlefish caviar that’d fit in a dump truck if I asked him to. You cannot beat the quality, service, and expertise that come from A Guy, plus it builds community, which is something I care about and you should, too. When I was at the greengrocer next door, he saw me and waved. He wasn’t open yet but had some PEI mussels he sold me for cash and triple-wrapped in ice. We have no choice, as they say, but to stan.
*Also I didn’t realize that the majority of people who are able to make a career in print magazine journalism, which requires a ton of unpaid internships and very low wage jobs in New York Goddamned City, are either independently wealthy or drowning in credit card debt. How did I not know this? I’m from Kentucky, okay? It’s not like my parents had friends who worked at Martha Stewart Living and could inform me of this fact.
**For seafood boils! My family always called the discard vessel the “dead soldier bowl”, which we stopped doing when we realized it was maybe not sensitive to my former partner who had just redeployed home. I think we called it “the bowl for the used tails” or something. Honestly, I should probably not revert to that, since it does seem pretty unkind in retrospect.
Mussels in Cider
Adapted from Nigella Kitchen
Serves one
Ingredients:
about two pounds/a kilo of live mussels, cleaned and debearded (in my experience, they’re usually sold by roughly the kilo in little plastic web bags and at my fishmonger, they’re already prepped)
one nice knob of salted butter (I eyeball this, but think golf ball-sized)
half a medium white onion, chopped
two scallions, chopped
four cloves of garlic, minced
a generous pinch of red pepper flakes
two cups/450mL dry hard cider
two tablespoons fresh parsley, chopped
a demi baguette, to serve
To Do:
Dump the mussels in a wide colander over the sink and run cold water over them. Discard any that are already open or cracked.
In a medium-sized pot, heat the butter over medium heat. Add the onions and cook until translucent, about four or five minutes. Add the scallions, garlic, and red pepper flakes, then stir. As soon as they’re fragrant, add the cider, then dump in the mussels. Crank the heat to high and cover with a fitted lid. Allow to cook for a minute or two, then shake the pot. Repeat that two more times, then sneak a look. If they’re almost all opened up, you’re done. If not, close the lid, give it a shake, and check back in two or three minutes. I find that the amount of time it takes to slice and toast the baguette tends to be about the amount of time the mussels take to cook.
Use tongs to get the mussels into a bowl, then coat with as much of the cooking liquid as you want. Throw away any that didn’t open; they’re not safe to eat. Garnish with parsley and serve with warm bread. Colorful cloth napkin and ice-cold glass of Chablis optional but highly recommended.
A Note: If you don’t have hard cider, don’t like it, or just do not see the appeal of this, you can use dry white wine or inexpensive beer, like a PBR, instead. Don’t sub this for the sweet cider you get by the gallon at an apple orchard. The alcohol cooks off, I promise, but the sweet cider will assuredly make this very, very gross.