For dinner Monday night, I had leftover ingredients from the weekend to work with: a bowl of very ripe tomatoes, an onion, some garlic, two lemons, a handful of linguine, a bottle of Chardonnay, and one-and-a-half pounds of squid. The squid was leftover from the paella Bill made Saturday night. I rustled through my on-line recipe box looking for an easy tomato-white wine sauce that I had made a few weeks ago. With a quick search for "squid," a stuffed squid popped up. Upon opening the bag of porcelain sleek & glossy white squid tubes, I decided stuffing them would be a ridiculous endeavor. I would just quickly chop them up. A deconstructed squid dish. (Think Indiana Jones, in battle with a whip when a quick shot just seemed to make more sense.)
Thankfully, all the skin, ink, and cartilage was gone before said squid entered our house. I was left with long white tubes and long purple tentacles. I chopped the squid tubes into calamari rings and threw them into a strainer to rinse. I picked up the tentacles, some 4 - 6 inches long, and put them into the strainer as well. It was right about then that I thought, "I'm a heck of a long way from Iowa."
I didn't have time to soak the pieces in milk to tenderize them. I didn't get the meat tenderizing hammer out because I didn't want squid juice squirting all over my clean counter and floor. Rather, I decided they would just need to tenderize as they simmered away in tomatoes, onions, garlic and wine for a half hour.
As the ingredients came to a happy simmer in the pan, I took one last peek before putting the cover on. Puzzled by the bizarreness of these little creatures, prepared by my Iowa-born hands, smothered in a Creole-infused sauce. Would my granddad have eaten these? He loved fish, but this was a far-cry from beer-battered bullheads. Would my dad knowingly eat these? (Dad had unknowingly eaten them as we ordered fried calamari once while he was visiting. We didn't tell him the source of the nice rubbery, crunchy appetizer.)
The end result was delicious served over rice. So, do you eat chewy purple legs covered with little suction cups? Please do tell.
(This "recipe" is a little more complicated: Corn's On!)