squid

Righto. Dont get your hopes up, this isnt a super interesting post - mainly because we have not being doing super interesting things.

One day, I decided to be a little bit adventurous, so I went to the local (its good to support local businesses) fish supply store and had a squiz round and spotted a squid. I bought said squid, and brought him home. Then I looked through my cookbooks till I found the section about preparing a whole (yes, whole - as in allthe guts eyes and gooey bits) squid.


Then I attempted to clean and prepare it. It was a cold cold wellington winters day, and my fingers lost their circulation half way through - exposed to the cold cold water I was using to save power instead of the hot water.

The process is as follows: Separate the head from the 'mantle' (the big bit at the end which people generally cut into calamari rings) but gently tugging and twisting the two separate pieces.

Next, pull out all the guts. Be careful not to burst the ink sac thing, you can save that for later and make a 'lovely' (more on that later) 'Risotto Nero'. You'll discover its spine thing, its like a long shard of plastic that runs the length of the body, and remove that too.

Then, skin it by peeling the spotty membrane covering most of it's body off.

With the head and tenticle section, chop the tentacles off from the head of it, and separate out. Skin these too.


Then you can chop it all up however you like, I was stir-frying so I lightly scored (in a diagonal fashion) all over the main mantle piece with a sharp knife, and chopped it into rectangular pieces. I left the tentacles whole, but pulled all the suckers off. all this took about an hour - much longer than I expected!


Then I marinated it in the fridge for 1/2 an hour or so in ginger, garlic, chilli, spring onion, soy sauce and oyster sauce, and then stir fried it for a couple of minutes till no longer transparent. I served it with a rice-stick noodle salad and sesame/honey bok choy.


The next day I made 'risotto nero', which is squid ink risotto. I will never again eat risotto nero. It was a waste of 40 minutes. It still looked amazing though, so black!


In other news, I've officially finished my BA majoring in Design Studies and Geography, and am still working behind the coffee machine most days.

Also, I won a pair of very expensive Shannon Britt shoes from shuzsociety (http://www.shuzsociety.com/FabFridayArchive) check it out!!
yay for my first ever prize.
Hope everyone in the states is doing great, and congrats Jordan and Will! hope the day was great.
Also, best wishes for Steve and Alexis on their up-and-coming big day, should be swell - just wish we could be there!!

Apologies for our boring lives. After next weekend might be something to post, my cousin Jacob is getting married down in Christchurch, we're flying down on friday for the weekend.
And we've booked flights to Perth on the 27th of August till the 7th of September, so check back after that for some great travel goss.
Have fun children!