Having spent the morning walking all over old-town Nice, on the jewel-toned Riviera coast of France, it was time to eat a bite… or maybe a hundred.
Miriam and I passed many little cafés with people sitting in front of grand, black buckets of just-steamed mussels. It was an enticing choice that we didn’t resist.
When we started eating, I wasn’t paying attention. I’d pick up a mussel in one hand, take my fork in the other, and laboriously work the mussel out of its shell and into my mouth. Who knows how many mussels into the meal I was before I finally saw what Miriam was doing. Duh! She used an empty mussel shell as a sort of mini-tongs to easily pluck the meat out of another shell and pop it into her mouth. It made absolute sense. Clever. Simple. Mussel consumption pared to the essence!
For 12,50 euro per person, we were each served a hundred mussels… or maybe more… plus fries or a salad, and some bread. I could easily have stopped at half that quantity. I felt full for a day afterwards. The mussels were simply prepared, steamed with onion, carrot, red pepper and celery. A light broth remained in the bottom of my black pot, and it was soaked up nicely with crusty bread.
Lesson learned. Thank you, Miriam!
Curious about the nutritional content of 100 mussels, I looked it up and found the FitDay web site and its results. Gee, do you think I got enough protein? Or how about the sodium and potassium?! Or vitamin B12?! Wow. The calories were plentiful, but “only” a quarter of them were fat, and of those only a sixth were saturated fats.
