Friday 9 March 2012

Moules Marinière

Today, you find me, at 8am on a grey weekday morning, almost overwhelmed with excitement. In a matter of hours, I will be heading to PARIS. Paris, my favourite place in the whole world. I almost never mention this, but I lived there for a year. This will be my first trip back since I locked the door of my unheated attic apartment for the last time, tiptoed down the 5 flights of stairs to avoid waking the sociopath neighbour, jumped in a car full of my most treasured possessions and hot footed it back to the UK almost five years ago.  I am expecting overwhelming surges of nostalgia as well as standing on street corners (not like that) scowling at tourists and muttering ‘well it wasn’t like this in my day’.

In honour of my imminent triumphal return to the City of Light, and because it was International Women’s Day (not really, although I did recently read Germaine Greer’s The Whole Woman and I have a lot of thoughts on this subject *glares at the patriarchy*), yesterday I invited my friend over for moules marinière.

By happy coincidence, this particular friend lived with me in Paris and some/most of my nice memories from that year involve her. I would particularly like to mention NYE 2006, where we accidentally celebrated the new year 15 minutes early wearing men’s clothes, and she developed an actual allergy to rum that lasts to this day. It was a good night.  

Anyway, over she came and we ate moules and drank kirs and sat up for hours singing along to Leonard Cohen songs and hugging each other a lot.  Maybe this is why men hate women.

Moules Marinière
Serves 2

If you are put off by the thought of preparing mussels at home, don’t be. Almost nothing could be simpler, they don’t smell and they take literally 3 minutes to cook.

You will need:
Knob of butter
1 small onion
1 clove of garlic
1kg of mussels
Glass of white wine
Splash of double cream
Handful of chopped parsley

-Rinse the mussels thoroughly in cold water. (I put them in a colander under the tap and shake it a lot).
-The mussel shells should all be tightly closed. Any open ones should be tapped firmly. If they close, it’s probably fine. If they stay open, they’re dead and will quite possibly kill you too in revenge. Joking. But do discard them.
-If there are any fronds/stringy bits/seaweed attached to the mussel shells, pull them off.
-In a large saucepan, melt the butter, add the chopped onion and garlic and heat through.
-Throw the mussels in, throw the white wine on top, put the lid on the saucepan.
-Do nothing for 3 minutes.
-Shake the saucepan.
-Take the lid off, add a generous splash of double cream, stir through.
-Serve with the chopped parsley on top and possibly some chips or bread.
(you might need a spoon to eat the sauce with)

et voilà!

Monday 5 March 2012

It's (not that) grim up North

Two very good friends of mine recently got engaged, and to mark the occasion, albeit it almost 2 months later, a few of us decided to go up and celebrate with them. Unfortunately, they live in Hull.

So the Dream Team (previously mentioned in these pages, and the name seems to have stuck), a banker and I got on a train.  The journey was much as you would imagine. Actually, maybe you can’t imagine it. If you have children, you might be able to. One of the Dream Team had a tantrum half way through because he was tired. The other one had inexplicably bought a desktop computer along. The banker won Trivial Pursuit. Eating crème eggs produced a massive sugar high. We saw real working power stations for the first time.

Although it had seemed like the never ending story, in due course the train arrived in Hull. Our friends were waiting and we made our way back to theirs for a cup of tea and a catch up.  Despite most of us being something akin to legends whilst at university (between us we can claim alcohol related kidney problems, gastritis, gout, countless near death experiences and at least one unexpected 2.2), gone are the days when we could start drinking at 3pm and push on through until the next day. We needed something fun and safe to do whilst we waiting for international official drinking time – 6pm – and settled on the world’s first submarium, The Deep.

It. Was. Awesome. We saw feeding time in the lagoon, mini sharks, cute deadly frogs, a blue lobster, the ugliest eel in the world, rays, swordfish, jellyfish, other fish…ooh and there’s a glass lift! Even an incident where hand sanitizer gel was used to imitate bodily fluids and wiped on my arm couldn’t dent the mood.

Cute deadly frog

Our hosts (who you can tell are real grown ups because not only are they engaged but they have things like airbeds, spare duvets, clean towels and chilled tonic water) then decided on a local restaurant for dinner using the dubious skills of Trip Advisor, and after a quick pit stop for a g&t and a clean shirt (boys)/more eyeliner (girls) we headed out.

The restaurant, Brimble's Bistro, was lovely. The owner Dean was quite possibly the friendliest man in the world and the great ‘British brasserie’ food and atmosphere made it a wonderful evening.

I have just seen on the website that their dinner service is 6-9.30pm, in which case it gets an even bigger thumbs up as we definitely outstayed our welcome.  If you are ever in Hull, go there immediately.

3 hours later, we headed back and got stuck into the parlour games and amaretto, which you really don’t need to hear about. Suffice to say that the next day, whilst 4 of us sat around and ate huge amounts of truly excellent home cooked roast chicken and apple crumble, one member of the party was forced to retire to bed for a time out. Older, but not wiser.