Less is more

The main supermarket in Holland, Albert Heyn, publishes a monthly free magazine with lots of recipes in it. My parents both save them for me as I find them fun to read, and the recipes are often very good. The last issue had a recipe for mussels which caught my eye straightaway: just cooked in 'witbier' (this translates as lager, but it can't be the same, as I like witbier and not lager!) with chopped salad onions. I have a love-hate relationship with mussels, sometimes I love them, at other times I don't even want to think about eating them. When we were in Cornwall, B. caught some when he was out snorkeling and he still talks about how nobody wanted to eat them. Yesterday though, I really fancied them, so we stopped off at the fish stall in Harleston and brought a bag of Brancaster mussels home. I'd never cooked them myself and can't believe how easy it is to prepare them. And this recipe definitely shows that less is more: they were delicious and well worth repeating.


For dessert I had made an apple cake. I've been following the Caked Crusader's blog for a while and have tried several of her recipes, and none of them have failed yet. I wasn't paying enough attention to the recipe while cooking and forgot to slice the apples before coating them in cinnamon/sugar, but I just left the cake to cook a bit longer in the oven and they were fine. The cinnamon/sugar mixture goes really sticky and gooey, and is dreamy combined with the soft apples. A perfect seasonal recipe!