now thats what i call a squid dissection!

Squid is like Heroin. You have that amazing calamari that one time, and then you spend the rest of your life searching for that same hit. Really really good squid is rare – or perhaps it just is in this relative backwater! I had tried calamari several times – mostly rubbery rings served with a salad and dip with a dangerous amount of garlic, but my first good squid was in South Africa. It was proper sweet succulent melt in the mouth stuff – one of those memories that really sticks with you and gets absorbed into the Id – this may have been added to due to my being 16, in South Africa and at my cousins Hen Night, all guaranteed to pack a psychological punch! I find that, as with most other things, its best to make your own…

Now if anyone hasn’t seen the channel 4 documentary “Inside Nature’s Giants: the Giant Squid” – well it’s about time!!!

It may be worth warning that this documentary is not for the faint hearted – it’s actually quite gory and explicit – but if you’re going to prepare fresh squid, well, it’s not going to be anything new! Understanding how the thing was put together and how it worked really helped me do it efficiently.

I cooked from “Darina Allen’s Ballymaloe Cookery Course” again last night – I’ve used a cookery book twice in the last week or so – and it’s been this one both times – I don’t know that I can say the recipes are better, but there are over 1,100 of them – so you’ll get what you’re looking for! The instructions for filleting (?) a squid were the clearest I’ve ever seen – and after watching the dissection of the Giant one the other night I found it really easy! I’ve made salt and pepper squid with baby squid before, and found it really fiddly, so this was much better – I must admit though, when I opened the bag and realised that it still had eyes I nearly backed out!

This was a fairly awesome meal for the price! I’ve been poor for too long now to ever pay full price for anything – we had lime scented rice (oh yes – a cheat! It costs £1 and it does in the microwave in 2 minutes), a reasonable large whole squid (reduced to clear £1.80 at Tesco’s, weighing 0.485kg) and a packet of pak choy that my mother gave us – so it was free. I don’t see much point in including 2tbsp of flour or salt and pepper, oil, sweet chilli sauce etc – I’m going to cover it with 50p and have done – so I estimate that our awesome dinner cost £1.65 each. Ha! Take that ready meals!

So in honour of my Thursday night salt and pepper squid we have a really cute digi stamp : )

I hope you like it!