It's like mussles but different...

Well, mussel fail.  It's confirmed.  After murdering a 5 lb bag of mussels (I really didn't know they were alive when you buy them) by putting them away in fridge for a day in a closed bag, I decided to head over to Harris Teeter, after the gym tonight, to try my shot at finding them again.  Oh, I found them but after tapping at the whole array of mussels that were on ice (in net bags), none of them would even pretend to shut. I realized they were like 90% dead if not more and slimy at that! Ew. The whole area was stinky.  I looked over at the seafood counter and scowled at disapproval.  You see, maybe I didn't murder them afterall. Maybe I naively bought mussel corpses and they (seafood counter folks) framed me of their murder. Why me? Ok, rant over.  Point is, I smartly decided against buying dead mussels and instead opted for shrimp.

I got everything out and proceeded to dive in.  I chopped the onion and garlic as well as some fresh basil (that was my taking liberties) and set aside.  Squeezed the oily chorizo out of the casin, into oiled frying pan and browned, then set aside in bowl and threw in the goodies and let them sizzle. The onions, garlic and basil cooking up in the chorizo infused oil was so yummy smelling that Cowboy came sniffing around in excitement.  Since I was modifying the recipe to just have a pound or so of shrimp instead of all the mussels,  I only used about 2 1/2 cups of white wine to deglaze the pan and it turned out to be a perfect amount.

What I'd suggest in cooking this would be to use angel hair pasta as the carb of the dish and up the amount of wine at that point so that the angel hair pasta can sop it up. Other than that, it was quite possibly a perfect recipe.  Good find, Jems!

Sizzling pan full of goodness, just about done.

Plated and ready to eat. I put a bit of the sauce/broth in a separate bowl to sop up w/the toasted bread which ended up being a really nice side treat to it.