I am known amongst those closest to me to be a woman who loves to cook but also an extremely picky eater. It is these two things that led to this challenge.
With the help of my sister, I will cook every single one of the recipes from Allegra McEvedy's 'Around the World in 120 Recipes', aiming to do three recipes a week. Why this specific book you ask? Well, it's simple - we wanted adventurous and varying recipes and this book gets great reviews!!
Follow this blog and you will see how my tastes progress as I experiment and how we inspire our weekly menu. We're cooking each dish for a family of three adults and a toddler. Obviously some of the recipes won't necessarily be suitable for the toddler but we'll try and vary as many of them as possible so that she can enjoy the experiment too!
The whole household is looking forward to this challenge because, like many others, we have dug ourselves into a little bit of a food rut. With three working adults, all with their own favourite dishes, it becomes more and more difficult to come up with new and inventive dinners that aren't too time consuming to make.

So, challenge accepted! Lets see how this goes!

Thursday, 31 July 2014

Grilled Lapas (Portugal)

The big bag o'fresh mussels
Apparently, Lapas is Portugese for mussels. There's your new fact for the day! 

 So, this is an incredibly easy recipe for grilled mussels.  Since the mussels need to be fresh, this is another dish we opted to cook in France. The mussels are topped with a herb butter before being grilled so I was hoping that this recipe changed my mind about mussels.  

 Soph and dad were both really excited about this recipe because both of them are very fond of mussels.  I'm less keen.  I don't find the taste too bad but the texture is just not something I like. 

Since mum and dad are more experienced when it comes to cooking mussels, they were instrumental in this recipe.  Mum started by going through the bag of mussels and binning any that were already open.  
Mum using Soph's newly
acquired garlic pealer
The next step in the recipe is to fry the mussels, which Dad kindly agreed to do for me.  It is very important at this stage not to let them cook; you just want them to open enough for you to split the shells.  Once dad had completed this part of the recipe and it was time to put in the herb butter that my mum had compiled while dad was cooking.    

It was at this point that we realised Allegra probably had larger mussels in mind for this recipe.  The ones we had were rather small which made this job a little fiddly but we managed ok nonetheless.  




When each mussel has some herb butter on it, they are grilled for 4-5 minutes and, once cooked, they're ready to eat.  All in all, the recipe takes about 15 minutes to make so it was really quick - great for a quick snack for the hungry.  

 As expected I wasnt really a fan but they were ok. The herby butter made them taste great but I still don't like the texture. Soph, mum, and dad all liked them though. They especially liked how easy they were to make and how flavourful they were.  The baby even liked them so I'd say it was a success for the most part.  
Soph said they tasted so excellent considering they were so simple and quick that she'll make mussels like this from now on.  




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