The weather has turned warm which is all the excuse that I need to cook the laziest seafood meal possible: mussels. After debearding the mussels (removing the thready bits by pulling them towards the pointy end of the shell) and scrubbing them clean, you can cook them in about five minutes, in a single process. Combine with any tasty liquid and boil. It is the epitome of lenient cuisine.

Here is SBS’s recipe for bucatini pasta with mussels - mussels steamed in beer with tomatoes, served with pasta. I had planned to follow this – it is one of the recipes that in the near future, I’ll have grown or made every ingredient within it bar the shellfish.

Mussels do not sound difficult to grow. I am sure that there is much more science behind it than this, but the process seems to consist of dipping one sort of rope into the sea to collect the planktonic larval mussels (“spat”), placing the tiny spat into a sock, winding said sock around another rope and then dipping that back into the sea. Wait 15 months and if enough plankton has floated past the mussels, you’ll have dinner. Being filter feeders that do not require additional tending, farmed mussels are relatively environmentally benign as compared to other aquaculture. The older way to collect mussels, dredging, was possibly the worst way to capture anything edible and as far as I know, is no longer practised in Australia.

If you’ve been following this blog for some time, in my attempts to cook my way through SBS’s back catalogue you’ll notice my almost chronic inability to stick to a recipe. While some of the time, it’s a result of a recipe’s vagueness, for the most part, it is my own intransigence.

Although the recipe specifies pilsener, any beer that doesn’t have too much bittering hops will work – wheat beers, hefeweizen, lambic ales, nondescript commercial lagers. If you boil down a hoppy, bitter beer, you will intensify the bitterness which won’t work well in a sauce.

My recipe for two ran as follows: combine a kilo of cleaned mussels, 4 ripe diced tomatoes (or if desperate, use the canned variety), a bunch of chopped flat leaf parsley, 2 cloves of chopped garlic, 2 bay leaves, a few sprigs of thyme and half a bottle of beer. My stubbornness kicked in, and I added 2 teaspoons of chilli flakes. Boil for five minutes in a heavy pot, lid on. Pour over cooked pasta or eat with crusty bread.

Ignore any advice that says that mussels that do not open after cooking must be discarded. It’s a complete myth.