KAL Cooking Week 1

Tonight, Laur, Kends and I had our inaugural weekly cooking date. Kends took 10 weeks of cooking lessons while in Mexico. He came back excited to show us all his new cooking skills. First on the menu: OCTOPI.

I knew this was going to be an adventure from the get-go when Kends calls me with bad news: his local grocery store ran out of octopi and squid ink! They said they are typically in stock but happened to run out on this particular day. It must be that time of year when everybody's craving octosquid.


We called around to 4 different grocery stores and finally found it at a store 15 minutes from my house. I went on the octopi run ... totally clueless on how to shop for octopi. Do I buy it in a can? Are we getting mini octopi? Do I ask the fishmonger to cut it? Can I get octopi filets? Kends said 1 kilo would be sufficient and that we wanted to buy a whole, large octopus. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate any squid ink.

Laur has been holding down the fort, preparing it for octo-fest. She is ...estatic to see that we got whole octopi - tentacles and all! Kends seems to be very pleased with the goods while Laur takes a little time to warm up to the little guys.


Laur was the master veggie cutter while Kends meticulously followed his bilingual Spanish-English recipe. Some choice words from his translation from his Spanish-speaking cooking teacher:

Preparacion
1. Cut off part of octopus with eyes

• Push out teeth with thumbs
• Stick finger through mouth, out head, and make sure nothing left
• Clean the octopus with salt - scrub it like clothes, wash with water and do this 3 times
• Before putting octopus in water, place in once, take out, in a second time, take out, and in a third time and leave it with boiling water, 2 dientes of ajo and a little onion and salt and cook for 15-20 minutes

Luckily the fishmonger had already detoothed/eyeballed the octopus and Kends let it go with just one washing. Here they are demonstrating proper octopi technique:


Sadly we slightly overcooked the octopi, but look at how curly the tentacles get:


There was a few onion-induced tears shed, neosporin/bandaid action and frantic chopping going on.. a high action meal for sure. Totally worth it though - the finished product was a success! I even got my anti-seafood roommate to try some & she said it tasted way better than she expected. I think she actually used the word "edible" to describe the octopus, while not a glowing review, it's something!


Kends made sure to show us the proper way to use the end of the curly tentacles to add some pizazz to the dish, ha.