Once again Anthony, you have me forking out 65 bucks for a bottle of liquor I am going to use an eggcup-full of in your recipe. ..and then lament this fact while guzzling the rest at my leisure.. Like the delicious Armagnac.. Man that stuff was good.

Starting out by sautéing mushrooms and bits of apple seemed an unlikely way to set out on a dish of mussels, but meh.. I had begun to put a dent in the Calvados by this stage and began to wonder about how the recipe calls for 3lb of mussels and I had roughly half that, and how halving the quantity of other ingredients doesn’t really work, for example if the liquid amount is halved it doesn’t fill up the pot to the correct ratio – it is not as if the mussels can be halved in size. I started thinking about how this is analogous to the Goldilocks effect in relation to life on earth, or how water might seem sticky to an ant, due to surface tension that we don’t notice.. I realised this was a digression I wouldn’t really have the space to explore fully when writing up this recipe..

It was around this time that I noticed that the recipe says to sauté the bacon until the fat has rendered, and set the bacon aside, but at no point does it come back to what next to do with the bacon. I ran the recipe past my flatmates who can vouch for this. Presumably this is a zen mechanism, or just to round out the smells in the kitchen. I figured this is all and well but I was going to just hurl the bacon in along with the cream and Calvados anyway. It turned out a pretty good addition.

In conclusion, this was unusual and delicious. But moules are great on their own, or kept as simple as possible. I much prefer moules marinières and moules à la portugaise.

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