On the east side of the island, you can collect your own mussels. The Wadden Sea mussel goes really well with cockles and lamb sausage. Here is a great recipe for a pan of mussels using Texel ingredients.

Ingredients for 2 persons:

• 400g mussels
• 200g cockles
• Splash of olive oil
• 150g lamb sausage
• 1 red pepper from Novalishoeve
• ½ tsp dried or fresh thyme
• ½ tbsp paprika powder
• Pinch of ground pepper
• ½ tsp salt
• 1 bunch of parsley
• 1 fresh country loaf from Novalishoeve

Method

Bring a large saucepan of salted water to the boil. Put the mussels and cockles in a container or colander. Clean the shellfish by shaking them thoroughly in cold water. Careful: any shellfish that stay open afterwards are not edible. Once clean, add the shellfish to the boiling water and cook them for 8 minutes.

Cut the lamb sausage in thin, half slices and finely chop the red pepper. Finely chop the fresh parsley. Heat a generous amount of olive oil in a frying pan. Add the sausage and fry for 2 minutes over a moderate heat. The oils released from the sausage will enrich the flavour of the shellfish, but make sure these oils don’t burn.

Turn up the heat to the highest setting and immediately add the mussels and cockles, chopped red pepper, paprika powder and thyme to the sausage in the pan. Stir-fry for 2 minutes and season with salt to taste if you like. Pour any excess oil away and sprinkle the mussels with parsley.

Serve with chunky slices of the country loaf.

See how mussels are gathered?

More Texel recipes