50 Recipes, #23: Mussels in coconut milk

I did not grow up cooking shellfish, not because my family is Jewish, but because my father is deathly allergic to all seafood. Couple that with the fact that bad shellfish will make you really sick, and you have one of the only types of food that I'm almost too intimidated to cook.

For some reason, though, possibly because we got lovely cilantro and basil in this week's CSA share, I was craving mussels in coconut milk. I bought some nice locally caught, wild mussels; cleaned them carefully; steamed them in coconut milk, wine, lime juice, fish sauce, brown sugar, basil, ginger, garlic, and chile pepper; and tossed them with chopped cilantro when they were done. Good lord, that was a tasty meal, and fortunately, I cooked plenty of jasmine rice to soak up the sauce.

There's still a couple of cups of leftover liquid, now strained and sitting in the freezer. Someone commenting on a similar Epicurious recipe said they liked to use leftover broth for seafood risotto, and that sounds perfectly fine to me.

Later, I may indulge in a few of the banana chocolate chip walnut mini-muffins I made this afternoon. Sugary muffins always taste better in miniature form.

More kinkmeme fic

Ten/Rose: after going to the beach and drying off, there's dried salt all over them. Written for platypus, and possibly the only fic I've written that involved consulting Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking. Note that the original version of this story has less porn, with things happening in a slightly different order, so obsessive perverts you may want to read both.