Squid!
As I wrote in my previous post about Haworth Fish, we also got squid in our first delivery on June 11. Sadly, we never got to order them again, and I haven’t seen them offered recently. Maybe there’s a season for squid in San Diego?
They are a bit time consuming to clean - to take out the beak, the quill,… I had learned this process several times already, once in a cooking class in Sydney, and another time at a cooking class in Catalonia, but it’s still kind of a chore and we had to consult a few different YouTube videos. Plus we tried to save as much ink as possible to make an arroz negro!
First though, we fried some up to make salt-and-pepper squid (June 12, the day after we got the delivery). The light coating of starch created a lot of sediment in the oil, so all of the oil had to be thrown out in the end. BUT, it was so delicious, the final product compensated for the work that came before.
The following day, we made the arroz negro, a type of paella with seafood and squid ink. In Spain, you can buy little plastic sachets of squid ink in the frozen section. Here, I knew there wasn’t nearly enough squid ink to turn the rice totally black. It was also a bit confusing if we were really extracting squid ink from the ink sacs, or just exploding the eyeballs? [hand covering mouth emoji]
I lightly sautéed the squid (and shrimp) in the pan to pre-cook them.
And then put them on top at the end, so that they didn’t overcook.
Well, I’d have to say this rice turned out decently black! However, a challenge with using brown rice for paella is that it takes much longer to cook than white bomba rice, so unfortunately even after cooking a very long time, the rice was still quite hard.
Finally the last day of cooking squid (June 14) with our remaining supply, we made a Thai squid salad based on this recipe from the NY Times. It was light and fresh, and slightly herbaceous with the cilantro. It felt just perfect for a summertime dish. I highly recommend this recipe!
