Linguine with Mussels & Kale

I got to visit a few girlfriends from college in the DC area one weekend in December.  I had lots of fun catching up with them, seeing old friends who happened to be in the area, and eating lots of good food!

The last couple nights of my visit, I went back to Baltimore and stayed with my friend Corinna.  I got a taste of the horrific schedule of a medical resident.  While I slept warmly and soundly in her bed (the girl made me!), I heard her getting ready for work at 4am, preparing herself to save the lives of many.  Contrastly, 6 hours later, I pulled myself out of bed and thought about what I was going to eat.  She suggested going to Lexington Market to pick up world-renowned crab cakes from Faidley's.  I strolled a couple blocks over to the market and found myself in a different world.  Let's just say if you were standing in the middle of the market, all you would see within a quarter mile radius were fried chicken vendors run by Asians and mountains of fresh collard greens.  I managed to finally find Faidley's in the back of the market and ordered myself a jumbo lump crab cake and cup of gumbo.  This crab cake was literally the size of a softball, and there was no extra batter to mask the taste or spare expenses.  It was delicious.  The gumbo was equally good.  Anyway I know this isn't an eating blog, but I will explain what I cooked that day.  

After lunch I proceeded to walk amongst the vendors and decided I would cook dinner that night.  I was in the perfect place to make a particular dish that Edwin actually makes a lot: Linguine w/ Mussels and Kale.  He found the recipe on a food blog he absolutely loves called seriouseats.com.  It's kind of an Alton Brown-ish blog written by Asians.  So anyway this linguine dish is our signature go-to dish when we have guests over because it looks really fancy but is super simple, feeds a lot of people, and is pretty economical.  So I bought a couple pounds of fresh mussels, a large bunch of kale, a few other things and headed home.  When I was getting ready to cook I realized that I had never actually made the dish completely myself; Edwin had always been the one to "debeard" and clean the mussels.  So I learned how to scrub and pull the strings out of those little guys, proud that I was way ahead of schedule.  Then Corinna calls me on her way home to announce we're going out to eat Korean food.    Ok, I was totally fine with that, thinking I was getting a little tired of the dish anyway. :)  So after returning from dinner that night, I cooked everything up, so that she could have something to eat all week.  Here's a picture of the final product.  Thanks Julie, Jennifer, and Corinna for the great weekend with y'all!