The Susanne

I awoke this morn­ing feel­ing fam­ished. And a little ill. After care­fully weigh­ing my options I decided to stay at home and write off today as an invest­ment in better health the rest of the week. After a few hours of relax­a­tion and Gilmore Girls I decided it was time to head to the super­mar­ket for some­thing to stave off the unbear­able hunger. I wanted to get fresh eggs, some bacon and maybe some veget­ables, although my fridge was already packed with the stuff. What I ended up buying was a kilo of mus­sels! Yum! Just from seeing the little nets of fresh, lovely mus­sels my stom­ach did a little flip and my mouth watered. I ran home and made Cozze alla Mar­in­ara. By the time it was done my hands were shak­ing so badly I couldn’t lift the spoon to my mouth without spill­ing. But some­how I man­aged to get a whole, deli­cious bowl down, the shak­ing stopped and I feel so good! There really is noth­ing like some fresh sea­food to turn a bad day around.

I had to make some slight changes to the recipe today as the market didn’t have any fresh pars­ley (what the?!) so I used a little dried pars­ley and then added some fresh cil­antro. I prob­ably should have left the cil­antro out, but the fresh chili I added with the tomato really gave the dish some lovely heat. In fact, I think I just might have room for one more bowl ;)

Spending some time here at Underøy I’m really begin­ning to open my eyes to what an abund­ant source of deli­cious things the sea really is. In the last five days I’ve caught a cod, a bucket full of crabs and another bucket full of mus­sels. All this is food that I would have to pay pretty dearly for back in Oslo and all food that I love. I love sea­food - pretty much all fish as well as crabs, mus­sels, lob­ster, prawns, shrimp, calamari… It all tastes so fresh and lovely, and it needs so little in terms of spices or fla­vour enhan­cers. Plus it tastes healthy. Anyone else think so? To me, sea­food some­how comes out­side of the normal food thing where cal­or­ies, fat con­tent and car­bo­hydrates count for any­thing. When it comes to sea­food, all that mat­ters is the lovely fla­vours. In fact, I know noth­ing about the fat con­tent in any sea­food except that I’ve heard some­where that salmon is full of the good fatty acids.

And this place… it must be what heaven is like. I never ima­gined being able to just walk out the door, a few metres down to the water’s edge car­ry­ing a bucket, and pick tonight’s dinner! It’s right there, just out­side the house walls! And if I feel like fish, all we have to do is jump in the boat which is also right there and with some luck we’ll come home with all the fish we could dream of. Or crabs, all you need is a bucket, a rake and a flash­light, and then take the boat out to one of the many little islets scattered around, and just pick them up from the side of the rock. Boil them in sea water, and eat.

It’s the sim­pli­city of it which gets me. Good sea­food is some­thing of a luxury in Oslo, which is such a shame because when pre­pared prop­erly it becomes such an amaz­ing gour­met meal, every time. And now that it’s so avail­able, I feel… I don’t quite know how to describe it. All I know is I feel happy inside, and that I don’t really want to go back to having to buy frozen shell­fish and check­ing the ‘fresh’ fish I buy to see if it’s really fresh. It’s so dif­fer­ent when you’ve caught it your­self: you’ve pulled it out of the sea, you’ve killed it, you’ve pulled out its guts, you know the exact amount of time it’s been dead before you cook and eat it and… well, it’s just amaz­ing. Oh and I forgot — It’s free! How bril­liant is that!

Our fish­ing trip last night was good, if not too much of a suc­cess i terms of catch: Trond got a pretty small pol­lock which I fryed up in some butter when we got home, and we all snacked on it. But I didn’t get any­thing. Trond also got a weird little thing called Horngjel (Gar­fish), which was thin and spiky and accord­ing to The Boy­friend can really hurt you when you try to unhook it. Luck­ily this one got loose on its own whilst we were doing a little pho­toshoot to document the cool catch.

When we got back, I felt pretty bad about coming back empty handed, so I took a little walk around the bay out­side the house and picked my first ever mussels. I didn’t know how much to get so I picked a whole bucket full, which weighed in at 7,5 kg. I quickly real­ised that that’s way too much for two people to eat, pos­sibly even a lot for seven or eight! (I read after­wards that 1 kg mus­sels per person is an appro­pri­ate por­tion size for an entree) So after I’d cleaned them all — which took me an hour– I threw 2/3 of them back into the bay.

I wanted to make them for dinner today, and as The Boy­friend is not known to be crazy about sea­food I decided to do a tomato/red wine broth instead of just steam­ing them in white wine which I believe is the more tra­di­tional way of pre­par­ing them. I also made some oven pota­toes just in case The Boy­friend didn’t love the meal enough to fill up on the scrump­tious little mus­sels. Although actu­ally, they were pretty big..

He turned out to love it almost as much as I did, in fact. It must have been the broth, which I’m very pleased with! Tomato, onion, garlic and red wine, a little thyme, and some car­rots and the mussles on top. Deli­cious! You can find the recipe under the Sea­food category…

The import­ant thing about mus­sels is, firstly - check­ing that the mus­sels in your area are safe to eat (if you’re pick­ing them your­self) and secondly - only using the ones that are closed or close upon touch. If they stay open, they’re dead and pos­sibly deadly. Like­wise, once they’re cooked, only eat the ones that have opened.

So that’s it: (raw = closed + cooked = open) = good.

To serve two (maybe three) you need:

• 2 kg fresh mussels
• 4 car­rots, julienned
• 1 red onion, chopped
• 4 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1 tin chopped tomato
• 1/2 bottle good red wine
• 1 tbsp thyme
• salt and pepper
• a good splash greek olive oil

In a large pot, sauté the onion in the olive until soft, then add the garlic and sauté until it starts turn­ing golden and gets that nutty aroma.

Add the tin of tomato and a little salt and pepper to taste, then pour in about half of the red wine. Let it all boil for a few minutes until it comes together and starts to thicken.

Add the thyme and the rest of the wine.

Place the car­rots in the broth and then place the mus­sels on top, and cover. Steam for about eight to ten minutes or until all the mus­sels have opened.