It should not be confused with Muscle Porn which would be more like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Pumping Iron movie. No, I’m talking about Prince Edward Island mussels steamed in a shallot-garlic wine sauce and garnished with Italian flat-leaf parsley – I like Sauvignon blanc wine for this purpose.
In his book, The Psychology of Everyday Things (POET), Donald Norman discusses the idea of usability – how the design of objects can facilitate or hinder our ability to use them. The general idea is that the more explanation is needed to use an object, the less usable the object is. We all encounter this when we buy a new gadget that comes with a 14-page document that explains how to prepare it for use, engage it, clean it, store it, etc. Such objects make my life less pleasant.
One of many things that can happen when we set out to use an object is derailment. I’m not talking trains here. I’m referring to what happens when we open the car door and our attention turns to some novel input – a sight, a smell, a text that just arrived on our smart phone, and as we attend to that input, we totally focking forget to get the shopping bags out of the back seat of the car. We walk to store only to then realize that we have arrived there bagless. Our planned routine has been derailed. Maybe that happens to you on the way to the kitchen or the fridge or … I hate it when that happens, but that’s exactly what happened to me today.
I stopped short of pulling a shopping cart out from the queue, and walked back to the car to retrieve the shopping bags that I had forgotten. Sigh. I shopped for our dinner ingredients, and when I got to the bakery area, I completely forgot to get a baguette – another derailment. Merde!
I got home, and only as I was cooking the mussels, did I realize I had no baguette. Yesterday, we had Kofta, and therefore still had two pieces of fresh, unused Pita. I improvised. Mussels with Pita are okay, but nothing beats a French baguette for sopping up all that yummy wine sauce and mussel liquor. Dinner looked like this.
