British Expat Forum

Kay decided to have a bit of a cooking session yesterday, so she sent me down to the market.

One of the things she asked for was mussels - but not too many, as she wanted them to flavour soup rather than to eat; about 250g would do. She also said that the green-lip ones were the best, but warned that they might be expensive.

When I got to the market, I found the green-lip mussels all right, but they came at two different prices. So I went for the more expensive ones... at 35 baht a kilo. So even with the 400g I ended up buying, I had to pay just 14 baht for them - 20p in sterling - or one baht per mussel.

Of course, when I got them home Kay had to perform the usual tests for freshness. The first one was to tap them and discard any that don't close. Except that when she came to do that, they were all tight shut anyway, even though a number of them had been open when she first looked in the bag.

The second freshness test comes after cooking - discard any that haven't opened. We chucked three in the end; they were probably OK as they had at least started to open, but for the sake of less than 5p we didn't think it was worth taking any risks.

They tasted great, too!

Just out of curiosity I looked on Sainsbury's website to see how much mussels cost there: £2.69 for a 500g packet of chilled Scottish rope-grown mussels. In other words, about ten times the price.

We love Thailand!