I rode 18 miles and we both had slow days at work, so neither of us was excited to cook.
I had cooked the one lb. octopus I bought at Pro’s Ranch Market last week for three or four hours to see if it would soften without pounding. The Joy of Cooking said that it needed to be tenderized and described fishermen pounding it on a rock. Suzette said it needed to be cooked in a pressure cooker, which we do not have. So I tried cooking it a long time to see if it would soften and it did. When we took the cooked octopus out of the pot it had been cooking in with 1 Tbs. of tomato paste and onion and the limes and shrimp shells left over from lunch’s soba soup with BBQ pork and bok choy, it was tender to the point that the tentacles fell off the body without any effort. So we stripped the soft dark exteriors from the tentacles leaving only the firm white flesh and cut the white flesh into bite sized sections.
While I snapped the ends off ten stalks of asparagus and fetched a bottle of Sangiovese ($3.99 at Trader Joe’s) from the basement, Suzette heated the PPI Sausage Marinara sauce from Sunday’s dinner and added sliced portabella mushrooms and more olives and some water and heated the sauce and then added the octopus sections to it. Suzette then heated the PPI spaghetti in the microwave and I slice slices of whole grain bread (Costco $4.99) and poured wine and set the table.
After dinner we finished the chocolate chip cookies with the last of the Sangiovese.
So today I added a new ingredient that I had never cooked before; octopus. I must say that it radiated the smell of the sea throughout the house, so you can accept that as good or bad depending upon how you feel. I thought of it as good as I thought of the many poor people whose highest form of protein is octopus and how that smell was a joy to them.
Bon Appètit
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