musselbound.

Maybe I'm amazed...well, no. Nope, I'm totally amazed at how good a body can feel when it hasn't been drinking and smoking and staying out late like a dullard...when it gets up early and goes to the gym and gets some sun, etc. I'm going to go ahead and recommend that I continue to do this. I still look like Keith Richards, but I feel like, I don't know...Prince? k.d. lang? Hopefully not. I don't have any idea, let me think about it.

So, what with the past couple few several weeks being devoted to the psychedelic drone abstract country rock 'n' roll lifestyle and the stress of family medical emergencies, the grocery budget has taken a back seat. The back seat, actually, there's only one.

So we now return to the budget lifestyle. After today. Here's something I don't think you see in America, or do you? At the grocery store, this is the way you buy a kilo of mussels:

Which I haven't done very often here because well I just haven't. But this week mussels showed up at the Dirk for a good price, and while I didn't buy them, I've been thinking about them. And thus today while I was at Albert Heiniehole and I saw these bitches I grabbed them.

In addition to thinking about food as little as possible, another of the week's goals is to use up leftovers or abandoned condiments in the fridge. Yesterday's ancho ketchup was part of this initiative, as was the Brazilian shrimp with tomatos, onions, and hearts of palm that I made on Friday...it was comforting and good without being exactly exciting, kind of like Cuban food.

But now I'm getting down to the point where there's not much left to work with except pickles, cheese, and mindblowingly hot sambals. Oh, and an open can of Italian tomatoes. Maybe we'll take our mussels in a Spanish direction.

UPDATE: "We" took them in an Italian direction, for a number of reasons. I had no salt in the house, but I did have some extremely salty Kalamata olives that needed something useful to do. I also had a few salted capers left, an open can of tomatoes, etc...it's plain that it was "in the cards", as they say. Basically a mussels fra diavolo, with bulgur (Our Grain of Choice) replacing the linguini. Excessively edible, very good.

Oh yeah, remind me to tell you the very funny thing that Joost said after he accidentally cut the tip of his finger off.

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