Butter and White Wine Mussels with Lemon and Snow Pea Sprouts

Spring has sprung which means its time to stop the comfort food binge and feast on the delicate flavours of the new season. Spring brings with it so much promise: the garden is bursting with edible treats; a trip to the fruit market yields new in-season treats bursting with flavour; and seafood seems like the perfect option for a delicious meal in milder weather.

Following on from our Chocolate Pecan Lattice Pie, Lurpak Butter and Chew Town continue to work together to bring you great meals to inspire you to get into the kitchen as part of Lurpak’s “Game On Cooks” campaign. For my Spring post in partnership with Lurpak, I’m bringing you this incredible butter and white wine mussels dish. If you haven’t tried cooking mussels before, you are in for a surprise. Not just reserved for the kitchen of a French chef, mussels are a wonderful way for you to enjoy a quick cook seafood meal at home that looks like far more effort than it actually is. If you read Chew Town regularly you will know that I am all about bringing you recipes that make you look as good as possible in the kitchen.

The beauty of this dish is that the butter is the star – as it should be for a Lurpak inspired dish. It all starts with an incredible lemon, wine, shallot and caper butter which can even be made a few days beforehand. Then, when you are ready to cook it it happens in no time. You just melt some of the butter in a pot, sauté a few aromatic ingredients, toss in the mussels with some wine, and in minutes you have an incredible mussel dish.

Sounds too easy? it is that easy… I promise.

The best thing about mussels is that they will tell you when they are cooked! Basically when all of them have popped open their little shells they are ready to eat.

It is important to know a couple of things about mussels when buying and cooking them:

• You want to buy mussels that are pot ready as its the easiest way to prepare them. Here in Australia, they come in vac sealed bags washed, scrubbed and de-bearded. The beards are the filaments that the mussel uses to secure itself to hard surfaces and they look a little like seaweed. Most mussels have been farm-raised so most likely the beards will be removed.
• Before cooking, once you have removed them from the bag, you want to throw out any mussels whose shells have broken in transit or are open already, these should not be eaten.
• After cooking, you may find that a few of the mussels haven’t opened in the cooking process (you may find one or two) if the rest are open, these also shouldn’t be eaten.

That’s all you need to know. This recipe makes double the butter quantity you will require for the recipe, but you’ll find a myriad of ways to use it up, it is delicious served with steamed or pan fried fish, great brushed on prawns then thrown on the BBQ or even pushed under the skin of a chicken you are about to roast.

Chew Town would like to acknowledge its partnership with Lurpak Butter for this post. You can read Chew Town’s disclosure statement here for more information on brands that Chew Town chooses to work with and why. The recipe above was created, developed and photographed by Chew Town using Lurpak Unsalted Butter.