Basil Mussel Sausage Aglio e Olio

The basis of this dish is extra virgin olive oil and garlic. Whenever I’ve made this dish in the past, I would thinly slice garlic cloves to get the desired quantity (which is more than most recipes call for since I like garlic). At my local Korean market, minced garlic (mixed with a small amount of water) is available in containers up to 5 lbs. (2.3 kg), which is a lot of minced garlic! So I bought a 1 lb. (454 g.) container and used a small portion of that garlic for this recipe together with frozen mussel meat. Most recipes use fresh mussels in the shell to make this dish and the broth from cooking the mussels become part of the sauce. So to emulate that process, I thawed the mussels in white wine and then used the mussel infused wine in the sauce.

You can save some time by cooking the pasta while the other ingredients are prepared. I never do this since prep time always seems to exceed pasta cooking time for me, but for those of you that are speedier, you can use parallel processing to make this dish. Finally I used a wok to make this dish (which certainly isn’t a traditional Italian method!), but you can certainly use a pan.

Enjoy!

Mussels and Ground Pork with Snow Peas (荷蘭豆貽貝豬肉, Ho4 Laan4 Dau6 Ji4 Bui3 Zyu1 Juk6)

This recipe was updated on 28 Jun 2015. Some instructions and ingredient quantities were changed.

Ground pork with mung bean vermicelli (also called bean threads) is a classic combination, just those ingredients together make a dish. Adding snow peas and mussels is my customization to the recipe. You can eat the dish all by itself or serve it over rice.

Enjoy!