My friend and I both finished exams around December 10 this year, and to celebrate we decided to cook something nice for dinner. After much discussion, we decided on spaghetti vongole, a dish we both love but had never cooked before. We stopped at the fishmonger's (a first for both of us I believe) and bought some mussels and a bit of squid, then headed home to start.
Having no idea how to cook mussels, we looked up directions online and found, on nearly every website, that if the mussel is open, it's dead and not edible. Well, we looked at our collection of mussels, and about half of them were open. Had we really been sold mostly dead mussels?!
Luckily, we kept searching different ways to cook them, and finally realized that ours were open not, in fact, because they were dead, but because they were alive, and in order to be sure of this fact, we must bang them sharply against the counter. If they start to close, they're alive. After painstakingly banging every mussel against the counter, and assessing that all but three were alive and well (for the time being anyway) we began to cook.
We had the linguine boiling in one pot, the mussels heating in some white wine, olive oil, and garlic in another, and the squid heating up in a third pot. Soon, all was cooked and ready. (For the mussels, we knew they were cooked because this time they were all open, thus now all dead. Poor little guys).
We added some salt and olive oil and a little butter, and then everything was mixed together in the big pot and ready to go.