This is not a post with answers. I wish I had them.

Sometimes it feels like the internet works like this: Five quick fixes for brain fog! Just take this supplement and stand on your head twice daily and eat grapes two at a time and your brain will just start working properly like magic! YMMV, so don’t come calling if none of this works for you.

We get our hopes up, and then they’re dashed. I’m not going to do that here.

This is more of a “where I’ve been the past month and a half” kind of post, and a bit of an “in my shoes” or really, “in my brain,” kind of post. It’s pretty in there, if you like that thick, early morning fog that rolls over the hills, and don’t mind if it hides a moose or two that you might just walk into, or that might walk into you. That’s the tricky part, that things can sneak up on you and you don’t see them until you’re right on top of them, scrambling to respond properly before you get trampled.

I became undeniably ill in the fall of 2011, but I started having odd symptoms well before that, all the way back to 2008. I’d started having trouble with some of my joints and pain in old injuries. I put it down to repetitive strain from my yoga practice and switched to riding my bike more. Then I started to become sensitive to wool, even to shirts and sweaters I’d owned and worn for years. But I didn’t think much of it until I was really sick, and doctor after doctor ran test after test, and all of them left with me with few answers.

I’ve had several diagnoses over the years, from chronic sinus infections to IBS to candida and now Lyme disease plus co-infections. At this point I’m pretty sure that the Lyme disease and related tickborne infections––acquired the first time I lived in MN, because the tick that carries the Lyme strain I have lives only in the upper midwest––was the cause of all the others. Unfortunately, it took over a decade to find out I have it. The CDC Lyme test only checks for Borrelia burgdorferi, which ticks across the US can carry. It does not check for Borrelia mayonii. In fact, B. mayonii was only discovered in 2013. I had already been sick for a couple of years by then and had moved to Seattle––even if my doctors had read about the discovery of B. mayonii, they had no reason to think I had it. Even now, you can only be tested for B. mayonii at the Mayo Clinic, though it may show up if your doctor does a very in-depth––and expensive, not covered by insurance––tickborne panel (the latter is how I found out).

Long-term Lyme disease comes with the potential for permanent neurological and cardiovascular damage. I’ve been lucky on the cardiovascular side, as I haven’t had many symptoms there. I have been less lucky with the neurological symptoms, as I have headaches, arthritis, digestive issues that are linked to my nervous system, fatigue, brain fog, and the symptoms of fibromyalgia. Basically, I hurt all over, I’m tired, I can’t eat comfortably, I’m forgetful and easily confused, and I have a hard time focusing. Fun, right?

And that’s just the regular stuff. When things are really bad, I can have POTS symptoms––racing heart, feeling like I’m going to pass out if I stand up too fast––and exertional malaise just from sitting upright too long. I have to be careful with exercise because even a little can create fatigue for days.

Food can trigger a flair, but I keep a strict and consistent diet, so my flares usually come from over-exerting myself in some way. Sometimes it’s simply doing too much, but more often, it’s stress. Even a little bit of stress such as a bad night’s sleep or an unexpected change in direction at work can push me toward the trouble zone. Stack up several long work weeks in a row and I’m marching solidly toward collapse.

A flair can start small. An ache in my back and hips, some swelling in my sinuses. A mild headache after a mug of tea. Those last two relate to inflammation in my head, which is exactly as scary as it sounds. No one wants their brain to be inflamed. Usually on those days, my aches and pains will increase as the day progresses. And usually, I will have a degree of brain fog.

The fog can range from mild forgetfulness to losing time. Sometimes I can’t remember if I took my digestive enzymes before I started eating. Once I forgot to turn the stove off after I made breakfast. Occasionally it’s so bad that I don’t feel safe to drive––so I don’t, I never push that one. On the really bad days, I’ll move from one room to the next, take a seat, and fifteen minutes will go by before I realize I have no idea why I’m there or what I’m supposed to be doing, and how did it get so late? But then I float back into the fog, spending the day in and out, in and out, getting nothing done and then stressing that I’m falling behind.

The flares always come with a sense of overwhelm, though I suspect the overwhelm is the product and not a symptom. I’m fatigued and foggy, I just can’t do as much in a day as I’m used to doing. I need to rest, and every task takes longer than it should. So I fall behind in what I need to do. One day isn’t so bad, because I can catch up when I feel better, but a series of these days strung together and I’m in deep trouble. And the more I push to keep up, the more fatigued I become, until I wake up one morning and hurt so much it’s a struggle to get out of bed.

I know to give myself grace. This disease is not my fault. Some days I need to rest. But it can be hard to let myself fall behind and even harder to dig back out. Usually in these periods, I find I curl up into myself. I interact less. I want to be alone, because interaction is taxing, but also, I have a harder time conveying thoughts and keeping up with conversation. I struggle more with how to respond to things. And I forget––to reply to an email, that I posted on social media and people might reply to me, that I wanted to call someone. I forget to make connections.

That kind of feels like a summing up of brain fog––forgetting to make connections. Failing to remember that I went into the kitchen because it’s time to make dinner. Failing to remember that if I don’t read the mail, I could miss a bill and be late on a payment. Failing to remember that I have a task list and if I look at the list, I don’t have to remember all the tasks I need to do. Failing to remember that I can write tasks down at all.

So the fog rolls in and I pull the shutters down and curl up in the quiet, and do my best to remember to take my medications and supplements and feed my family and myself, and everything else falls to the wayside. The laundry doesn’t get folded. I don’t write. I’m slower at work. And then I come up for air and realize that the taxes aren’t done, and the task list has 50 to-dos. It’s hard not to sink into depression, to curl back in and give up.

But I don’t. I’m stubborn. I like life. I like writing and playing with my dog and cat and listening to music with my husband and taking pictures and sitting in nature and experiencing the world. I like being alive. And did I mention I’m stubborn?

I’ve worked through the last month and a half by pulling in, but also by indulging in something I can do when I’m foggy and tired: knitting. I have a sweater for my efforts that I’ll post about at some point, and I’m hoping to get the next one on the needles soon. And those taxes will be done by the time I post this, so at least that’s cleared out. This week I wrote the beginnings of two story ideas that have been simmering for a while––as foggy as it gets, my brain will only let me go so long without writing stories––and I’m hoping to dig back into my novel work-in-progress soon, this week or next. Maybe I’ll pop back in on social media, test the waters again.

I’m not rushing. I’m taking it all one thing at a time, because any kind of stress will put me right back into the soup. The sun is peaking through today, and that always gives me energy. It can take a while for the fog to burn off, to see the trees at the far end of the field. To take back what the mist has hidden. But I will. I always do.

When I make a photograph, it’s always a two-phase process.

Phase one is making the image in the camera. This is usually a multi-step process, and may have quite a lot of steps depending on the type of photograph. If my subject is wildlife, I may plan a hike and travel to the location, or find a good seat in the backyard and wait so that animals can be comfortable with my being there. For food or still life, I may need to do camera and lighting setup. I choose the right lens for what I want to photograph. I make sure my battery is charged.

Then I make the image. I choose my camera settings and take the shot, or maybe several, adjusting my focal point or various other camera settings on the fly so that I have options. When I can, I review the shots “in the can”––I imagine younger photographers refer to these as “on the card” which is what they actually are––to see if I’ve gotten what I want.

What I want depends on the subject. Is the lighting good? Is the subject in focus in the way that I wanted? Do I have the right depth of field? If my subject has eyes, are they looking at the camera or in a desirable location? Does the subject fall into my desired place in the frame? Does it feel like the picture I wanted to take?

That last one is the big one, because it sums up all the others and also adds this undefinable aspect that takes into account the emotion of the situation, my desire in making the image, and what I want to evoke in the viewer when they see it. If I feel awe at seeing a moose up close, I want the viewer to feel awe when they see my photograph of it. If I snap an image of friends having a good time, I want that happiness to be present in the image. Ultimately I want the viewer to feel something when they look at an image. If they don’t, the photo is forgettable.

It’s the same with writing. We want the reader to feel. While it’s nice for someone to read our writing and think, “that’s pretty,” or “that’s well written,” we really want more than that. We want a connection––to our characters, in the case of fiction, and in non-fiction, to ourselves. We don’t want our work to be forgettable.

With writing, we have the same setup work––we choose the subject and make our plan to tackle it. Maybe that plan is simply to sit down and write whatever comes to mind, in which case the setup is ensuring you have the chair and the writing tools. Maybe you’re a planner and the bulk of your story development happens in the “prep” stages of figuring out exactly what happens and how it plays out. Or you may be like me, straddling the line between the two, bouncing back and forth between discovery and planning––you have specific needs before you set out, and you adjust on the fly as you work.

Then, you make your images. You write your scenes, telling the stories of your characters. Maybe you stick to your plan, but even the most ardent of planners often adjusts on the fly as characters evolve and unexpected events develop on the page. I find I write exactly as I shoot, looking at what I have “in the can” and deciding if I’ve gotten what I wanted. If not, I keep writing until I get there. Fortunately I usually have fewer “takes” when drafting and don’t need to write something a dozen different ways to get something workable, I can make adjustments to what I have. And in both photography and writing, often when I think I’m only going to need one “take” to get it right, it doesn’t turn out the way I thought it would in my mind, and I have to make changes.

Once the images are in the camera, or the draft is complete, phase two begins.

On my camera, I shoot in RAW format, which means that the image contains all the data that it was able to capture when I pressed the shutter, but it hasn’t been processed to look like a good photo. It has some basic processing, but that’s all. These images are usually missing the spark that I saw when I pressed the shutter. With my phone, I shoot JPGs, which come with algorithmic processing that’s pretty good, but usually these also can use improvement. I put all my photos into Lightroom, a photo processing application, so that I can “develop” them into the finished images. You might say this is where I “revise.”

When I process a photo, I adjust the white balance of the image so that it resembles what my brain saw when I pressed the shutter. I may adjust the shadows and highlight areas to reveal more detail, or adjust the overall exposure (make the entire photo darker or lighter). I may darken the background so the subject pops more, or create highlights to draw the viewer’s eye where I want it to go. I make all of these adjustments with the mood in mind––a lighter, brighter image feels happier, and a darker image may evoke sadness or fear. A less saturated image could evoke emptiness or the passage of time, depending on how dark or light the image is.

Processing images makes them more appealing to the viewer, but that’s not my ultimate goal. The goal is to allow the viewer to see and feel what I saw and felt when I pressed the shutter. I’m not editing the image to improve it as much as I’m editing it to reflect the truth of my experience. To show what I saw when the sunlight hit the the autumn leaves, or the stillness of the morning in that early dawn where the sky is lavender and pink and the moon hadn’t quite set yet, and I was awed.

Sometimes I don’t remember exactly how something looked when I shot it, but I remember how it made me feel, what made me choose to press the shutter, and I edit to that. There’s a truth in representing exactly what I saw, but there’s a deeper truth in representing how it felt.

In writing, it’s much the same. We often think of edit passes as making our work better, but what does better mean? Sure, it can mean adding in the words you missed in your rush of drafting, making description shine, adding missed beats, making the dialogue feel real. Or it can mean sweeping rewrites to sort out plot and character arcs. On the scene level, I propose adding another goal: bringing the truth to the surface.

A few questions to ask:

• What is your character’s emotional truth?
• What’s the true tension on the scene?
• How can you convey that truth to the reader?
• Can you amplify the highlights to draw the reader’s attention exactly where you want it?
• What’s getting in the way of what you want the reader to feel, and how can you downplay or remove it?
• Are you conveying mood?
• What does the reader need on the page to feel the experience of the character’s truth?

This is by no means the be-all-end-all of revision techniques, but it can help to take a scene from good to great solely by shifting your perspective and letting you consider the scene in a new way. You can use your answers to these questions combined with your craft skills to target where you want to draw the reader’s attention, and to deepen their experience.

A side note:

When I sat down to write this, I was thinking on the parallels of the editing process, and how I could use the things I looked at in photo editing to improve my fiction editing. I didn’t realize until I wrote it that my photo shooting process is exactly the same as my drafting process, with a mix of planning and experimentation. If you write and pursue other creative hobbies, do you find your personal processes are similar? What have your other creative pursuits taught you?

As per Merriam-Webster, a lagniappe is “a small gift given to a customer by a merchant at the time of a purchase.” This is how Min came into our lives. Jim had gotten a job offer in the Park City area, and I flew out to house hunt with a realtor that a friend had recommended. One house––a top contender––had a very sweet kitten who purred so loud you could hear her coming. She followed me from room to room, and loved to be pet. I jokingly asked our realtor if she came with the house.

“We can ask. You never know, sometimes they say yes,” he said.

I didn’t really expect him to ask when we made our offer, but he did. It turned out that the owners were moving in with one of their children and couldn’t bring their cat with them. They’d been worried sick about what to do with her. We were happy to take her on, and she greeted us with purrs when we arrived.

“Motormouth” was what her previous people called her. It was a fitting name for a cat with a purr as loud as hers. She also had a deep-throated meow that you could hear across the house, and she had a lot to say. It turns out she wasn’t a kitten at all, but a senior somewhere over ten years old––no one was sure just how far over––a tiny 6-pound bundle of purr and meow that wasn’t going to get any bigger.

Min charmed Cooper, who had forgotten that he liked cats. She was patient with his doggishness, and he got used to her snuggling him while he slept. She loved a lap and could be counted on to find you if you were reading a book or watching television. She’d snuggle in with that roaring purr and keep purring until she fell asleep.

We found out at her first vet visit that her meowing was likely because she had thyroid disease, and her numbers were off the charts. Her thyroid was making her stressed and she was telling us about it. We put her on special food, to no avail. Then we tried medication. The medication helped a little, but not enough. She was going to need radiation.

We were fortunate to have an amazing vet who had had thyroid cancer herself, and had gone through the radiation process. It was the same for cats as for humans, and she talked me through everything we’d need to know, what the risks were, and what we’d need to do. She also warned us that sometimes hyperthyroidism hides other medical conditions, and she suspected that might be happening with Min.

I knew we needed to do the treatment, but something in my gut told me to wait. So we did. We kept trying the meds, adjusting the dosage. She was doing better, but not great. Her numbers were down, she was meowing a lot less, and she’d taken to sleeping under my chin at night.

Summertime came around again, and she was a fixture on our dining room table, curled on a cushion in the sun next to me while I revised a novel. She’d started to enjoy sitting on my shoulder like a parrot and snuggling into my neck or watching me write, purring heavily. She seemed happy, and we had many months like that.

Fall arrived. One day, I noticed she seemed tired. Other signs of trouble followed. It turned out her hyperactive thyroid was keeping her kidneys going despite advanced kidney disease. If we’d taken her for the radiation process, she would not have survived as long as she did. By delaying thyroid treatment, we’d gotten her one final summer of sunshine and snuggles.

She was only with us for a year and a half, but she brought us so much joy. I hope we brought the same to her.

I’m always learning new things, and I’m starting to believe one of the best ways to keep using what I’ve learned is to write it all down. Otherwise I’ll forget, and life will have to re-hammer that lesson home again when I most need it.

In order to avoid a re-hammering, I drafted this list at the end of 2022 and have been mulling it over and adding things as I identify them. Originally this list was just for me, but as I’m digging further into my first draft of this new YA project, I’ve been thinking more about what this project has taught me so far, and how I can use that to help me keep momentum up, and it seemed like these lessons might be useful to other writers as well.

Writing new projects helps me become a better writer overall.

We really do learn by writing new projects. You’ve probably heard the now-debunked theory that practicing for ten-thousand hours will make you an expert, and you may have heard others refute that theory with the argument that unless you’re actively learning, from a teacher or mentor or other expert, you’re only reinforcing the same bad habits. It’s my experience that the truth falls somewhere in the middle. If I keep working on the same manuscript, revising it over and over, after a certain point, I’m not making it better. I need to get input from others, to hone my craft and to see where my blind spots are. But an additional way to learn new things is to write new things.

When I write something new, with new characters and setting and story, I’m looking at everything with fresh eyes. This can give me a new perspective on my older work as well––it can shine a light on an old problem in a new way, which can help me to figure out how to fix it. I’ve seen this happen with previous work, and in critiquing work for others, but I definitely needed a reminder. Writing the beginning of this new manuscript, and stumbling over it as I always do, grasping for the just the right spot to get the foothold that would carry me through the story, helped me to see what I was missing in the beginning of the manuscript I shelved in 2021. I now have some great notes on what to do to re-write that beginning and how the rest of the book will flow from it.

Trust in the process, be patient, and move on.

It can take a long time to figure out why something isn’t working and how to fix it. I’ve heard it said that if someone tells you something isn’t working, they’re probably right, but if they tell you how to fix it, they’re probably wrong. That’s been my experience as well. Someone can show me the problem but none of the suggested solutions feel right, so figuring out how to fix it is completely up to me. Too often the fix eludes me, and the more I push at it, the more discouraged I become. That’s where I was with that 2021 manuscript––I knew it wasn’t working, but I was too in the weeds to be able to see what needed to change, and too stubborn to let it go. Eventually I had to, and in hindsight, I wish I’d done it sooner. Writing something new gave me the distance to see new possibilities.

Going forward, I need to trust in the process. Stepping away doesn’t mean I’m giving up. And it might be the best way not to.

I will probably never be the kind of writer that outlines an entire story scene by scene.

I’ve always been a plantser, splitting the difference between planner and a pantser, but I’ve also always seen myself as more of a planner. I’m a business consultant––I make project plans and work with my team to execute those plans, and we’re generally successful. So I know from decades of experience that planning works, as long as you’re open to surprises coming up and build a plan flexible enough to accommodate them. Why should my writing be any different?

The obvious answer is that writing is a creative pursuit, but I think it’s more that the writing is coming from my subconscious, and my subconscious is a free spirit that doesn’t work on a schedule and gets a bit contrarian when confronted with one. The part of my brain where the characters live isn’t the same part where my planning self lives.

The characters don’t care about my timeline, they need to experience the story to be able to make decisions about what they’ll do when confronted with each other and the resulting conflicts and situations. I can totally relate to that––of course I can, these characters are coming out of my brain and I don’t like to be hurried either! I need to put them into the situations to see what they’ll decide to do, and then go from there.

It’s okay that I don’t know the scene order, or all the events. I have my tent posts––plot points 1 and 2, the reversal, the dark night of the soul, and the final conflict––the rest will play out however it does, and I can fix it later.

I really can fix it later. So be less precious now.

I wrote previously about how I was being too precious with my drafting and it was slowing me down and even blocking me from writing new words. I need to allow my drafts to be as good or bad as they are because “workable” is all that matters. I really can fix it later, and I will keep saying it until it sinks in. If I want to write a lot of words this year, I need to accept that they won’t all be the right words, but writing the wrong words can help me find the right ones. For me, at least, there isn’t a better, faster, more efficient way to get there.

My mood matters.

The main character in this new manuscript has a very particular voice and way of looking at the world. She has an energy about her that younger-me relates to in a big way, though she says things I wasn’t bold enough to voice at that age. But current-me gets tired and out of sorts and loses that spunk, and that impacts how I write her. If my mood is wrong, the words that end up on the page are wrong too.

This doesn’t mean I have to wait to be in the right mood to write this manuscript. I just need to put rituals in place so that I’m in the right headspace when I sit down to write.

Everything is malleable.

Sometimes when I make a change to a story, especially something I’ve revised a number of times, it feels all wrong. I’ll re-read the scene and stumble at the place where I removed words, like I’m falling into a hole left behind in their absence. But often, the reason it feels wrong is because I’m used to the old way. Change is hard, even for someone like me who has had a lot of it and likes new things. So I need to write the change and then let it sit, and revisit it a few times until it feels comfortable. If I can make it better, I should. And if I can’t get used to the new way, I can try out the old way again––it’s a great way to find out the new way really is better.

Everything is malleable, no matter how old, or hastily written, or how badly I wanted to get it right the first time. I did not become a worse writer since I wrote that draft. I will always be capable of making a change or fixing a problem or writing a better scene next time. I don’t need to have a plan that I follow to spec; its a book not a house, though there are excellent house/book analogies that DO apply, such as having a good foundation. I need to trust in the process, and most of all, I need to trust myself.

This is what 2022 has taught me. As I’m going to be finishing this first draft, revising it, and hopefully going back to that 2021 manuscript as well, I’m sure there will be a lot of writing lessons to come for me in 2023.

What has your writing taught you?

I have always loved a big bowl of mussels since my first exposure to them as a teenager. I loved steamed clams as well, always dipped in a healthy (or less than healthy, depending on your perspective!) amount of clarified butter. When I lived in Hoboken, one of my favorite nights out was getting mussels at Margherita’s. I would switch up between the red sauce and the white wine with garlic. Sometimes I would follow my mussels appetizer with Seafood Margherita, their version of Frutti di Mare, a mix of shellfish and calamari over linguine. But my favorite of all the mussels dishes is Belgian-style moules frites.

Moules frites are mussels steamed in white wine, shallots, and garlic, with a side a French fries. Usually the fries come with their own side of mayonnaise––if you’ve never had fries with mayonnaise, it’s delicious! The mussels are often served in the pot they’re cooked in, which is filled with the white wine broth and whatever other yummy items were used to flavor that broth, such as celery, shallots or leeks, sometimes carrots, and occasionally sausage. Some restaurants will also serve it with crusty baguette that you can soak in the broth, but the fries work great for that too.

I’d had moules frites at a couple of different places around the city when I lived in NYC, and at Barbette in Minneapolis, but my most vivid memories of moules frites are from my first trip to Prague. We had a ton of amazing Czech food––I adore just about anything served with bread dumplings; roast duck is a favorite––but for lunch one day after touring Josefov, we came across Les Moules, a Belgian-style bistro. It can be challenging as a tourist to find good lunch spots in Prague’s Old Town, with so many restaurants of the “tourist trap” variety. Les Moules is the real deal, with a solid beer selection and a dozen different styles of mussels, along with oysters and a small selection of options for folks who aren’t into shellfish (vegetarians should skip this one for sure).

I ordered their house preparation, Mussels Les Moules, but they didn’t serve them with the little seafood fork I’d gotten used to in the States. As I started in with my larger fork, I noticed that no one else in the restaurant was using a fork, they were all using mussel shells like small tongs to pull the meat from the shell. I tried it out, and while it can be a little messy, it’s also much easier and you’re a lot less likely to send a mussel or shell flying onto the floor or your neighbor’s table! I was converted.

The mussels were fabulous, so much so that we went back for lunch the next day as well. Then we were off to Austria, but my love for Belgian-style mussels stayed with me, so I was thrilled when Brouwer’s Cafe opened in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, with two fantastic moules frites preparations (and Stoofvlees, which is a completely different adventure in yum). Brouwer’s also has an astounding selection of bottled Belgian beer and serves their frites with your choice of a half-dozen different sauces, all so delicious it’s worth it to pay a bit extra to try them all.

In the years since we moved from Seattle, mussels became more of a rare treat for me. That’s been especially true these last few years of pandemic. I’m no stranger to making fancy meals at home, but we’re back in Minneapolis, a bit further from Penn Cove than we used to be, and I didn’t feel good about buying mussels from the supermarket. In the last year, we’ve started driving over to Coastal Seafoods, a fantastic seafood market here in Minneapolis. We’ve had their shrimp and fish and everything has been fabulous, so when we were looking or something special for New Year’s Eve, I decided to try my hand at moules frites.

It turns out this is probably the easiest fancy dish I’ve made. It takes minutes rather than hours, and I spent more time slicing shallots and herbs than cooking. It smells absolutely delightful while on the stove as well. We did this for lunch two days in a row and it felt so fancy!

We ended up skipping the homemade frites for this go-round. Jim had his with crusty baguette and I did a side of chips. Next time I might try out making fries in my air fryer. With how easy this is, I’m sure we’ll be making it much more often.

Notes on the recipe:

I found this traditional recipe for the mussels portion of moules frites on the Food Network site, and as we’d picked up a few links of andouille sausage, I decided to add that in too. I’ve updated the recipe below with the sausage and also changed what I think was a mistype in the original––five tablespoons is a LOT of garlic; five cloves is much more reasonable.

Make sure your mussels are clean before cooking. Often by the time you get them from the market, they’ve been throughly rinsed and had the beards removed. I always rinse them again before cooking. If you’re not sure if your mussels have been cleaned, you can follow these instructions from AllRecipes.

The recipe calls for a straight-sided pan, and this will allow more of the mussels to sit within the liquid, keeping them moist and plump. I chose to use my Staub Perfect Pan, which is wok-shaped, because I wanted a clear lid so that I could see when the mussels were open. Either way you go, the steam is what cooks the mussels, so make sure you have a tight-fitting lid.

For the wine, we went with a nice Pinot Grigio. Any bottle you enjoy drinking would be a good fit here, as long as it’s not too oaky. I’d go with something balanced, not too dry or overly sweet, and avoid anything labeled as “cooking wine.” If you prefer not to cook with wine, you can substitute clam juice or vegetable broth.

I’ve included the crème fraîche from the original recipe as optional here. It’s part of the traditional preparation, so if you’re looking for that and can have dairy, you should include it. The only dairy I can have is butter, so I left the crème fraîche out, and didn’t miss it at all. If you can’t have any dairy, the broth will still be delicious without the butter.

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Belgian-Style Moules Frites

Prep Time 15 minutes minutes

Cook Time 15 minutes minutes

Servings 4 people

Equipment

• 1 Large cast iron dutch oven or straight-sided sauté pan with a tight-fitting lid

Ingredients

• 3 oz andouille sausage, sliced (optional)
• ¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil
• ½ cup shallots, finely sliced
• 5 cloves garlic, thinly sliced or minced
• 1 cup white wine
• salt
• black pepper
• 2 lbs mussels, cleaned and beards removed
• 2 tbsp unsalted butter
• ½ cup crème fraîche (optional)
• ⅓ cup fresh parsley, minced
• 2 tbsp chives, minced
• 2 tbsp whole-grain mustard

Instructions

• Set the pan on the stove to medium-high heat. Add the andouille sausage and cook on both sides until it darkens slightly in color, about 5-10 minutes.
• Lower the heat to medium and add the olive oil. Add the shallots and garlic and cook until softened, about 2 minutes.
• Add the white wine and bring it to a boil. Season with salt and pepper. Add the mussels. Cover and steam until the mussels open, about 3 minutes.
• Using a slotted spoon or sieve, transfer the mussels to a large serving bowl or several small serving bowls.
• Add the crème fraîche (if using), butter, parsley, chives, and mustard to the remaining cooking liquid in the pan, stirring to combine. Bring just to a boil, then pour over the mussels.
• Serve with French fries. Mayo for the fries and a hunk of crusty bread are also delicious.