Mussels, They're What's For Dinner

Mise en place - half an onion, sliced garlic, thinly sliced home-made pancetta and some garden-grown parsley.

Decided to do a riff on the Portuguese recipe from the Les Halles cookbook. Bourdain may be slipping into self-parody at this point in his television career but the guy wrote a solid cookbook. Of course, he has six mussels recipes that are all essentially the same technique with varied ingredients (which is why I felt comfortable turning the dish Italian with the pancetta) but hey, as long as people want to learn recipes and not skills why not take advantage?
The victims, fresh from the fish guy at the St. George farmer's market who had trucked them in from the North Shore of Long Island that morning. He made me laugh by referring to them as "rope grown"; I guess because farmed fish has a (justifiably in most cases) bad reputation among people who know food they don't even want to use the word for shellfish which is actually better if you can get it from farms - mussels, clams, and oysters clean the water, they don't pollute it the way say, a salmon farm does with feces, parasites and antibiotic-laced pellet feed. And farmed salmon gets artificially colored and tastes like crap. Anyhooo....

This is what the finished dish looked like. Couldn't be simpler - sweat the onion in olive oil until it starts to brown, toss in the garlic and pancetta and cook for another couple minutes, pour in white wine, bring to a boil, dump in your cleaned mussels, slap a lid on the pot and wait around, oh 8 minutes. Sprinkle the parsley (chopped fine) and dump the whole thing into a big bowl and make a big happy mess eating them and dipping some bread in the broth.

The whole thing takes about 20 minutes, and yet millions of my countrymen and women ate at friggin' Applebees tonight. Sigh.