Squid Tangle
Posted on November 20, 2006
I love cooking for friends, especially when they invite me to come over and mess up their kitchen instead of my own. Almost as sure as the nose on the back of my neck, if I cook dinner at someone else’s house, I don’t even have to think about cleaning up after myself. That’s why I prefer to save special, labor intensive projects for when I’m called upon to bring The Yummy on over.
“Sure, I’ll come over and cook. As a matter of fact, there’s an exciting dish I’ve been wanting to try out for a while now. Ten guests? No problem. I’ll take care of all the cooking. You guys can sit around and mingle over drinks until dinner’s ready.”
And so I arrive at your home a full 24 hours before dining is to commence with a live pig, 50 feet of rope and a Samoan broad-bladed machete. Once I’ve stunned the pig with your garden shovel and have him dreaming in the bathtub, I bring the implement outside and dig a shallow pit in your back yard…
I’m (mostly) kidding, of course, but I do enjoy getting a free pass to make a big mess in someone else’s home. Unless I have to cook on an electric stove. In this event, you’d better have a double magnum of wine waiting for me, because it is I who will get drunk while I cook. It’s like cooking on a large rock thrown into a fire. Why bother with the rock? Just cook on the fire. Electric stoves bring me to the verge of heart attack, stroke and vital internal organ inversion. In short, I have some manner of small episode every time I’m forced to use one. I would rather build a fire in the yard, or just set the electric stove on fire and cook on that. Yes, I’ve learned to work with their flaws when I really need to, but I still hate them on a molecular level.
The sole remedy for the mind-bending frustration at the lack of temperature control afforded by an electric stove is a collection of skillets fabricated from paper-thin metal. They’re the only thing that’ll get hot enough in time to allow you to accomplish a few other things in life before you’re in the grave. Would you like to see what happens to breaded, pan-fried squid when you can’t get the pan hot enough?
Is that pathetic or what? When I threw the breaded squid into the pan, the oil temperature dropped about 50 degrees and, unlike history’s depiction of Christ, refused to rise again. Sure, the squid were cooked, but the bread crumbs fell off and morphed into gooey, olive-oily clumps. The only way to compensate for the stove’s complete and utter failure was to direct the cephalopods down another culinary path. In went the chopped tomatoes, garlic, parsley and pine nuts, and then the mess was allowed to simmer briefly, since that was all I could get the damn stove to do. More olive oil, salt and lemon juice were dropped onto the Squid Tangle. At that point, it was something completely different, and actually quite delicious. Squid Tangle is well worth replicating in the future, but not over a cursed electric element.
» Filed Under food and drink
Hi John,
If you meant to discourage me from joint cooking with you - even in my kitchen - you failed :)
I love you blog and going to be a frequent guest here…