I woke up at 6:00 and made fruit salad with a medium papaya and pineapple and juice of 1 lime. Then I took my new med with a toasted bagel smeared with cream cheese and garnished with slices of Lax and onion. We then rode the tandem to Campbell Rd. and back.
I saved the strips of papaya skin and put them into a pot of water and brought it to a boil and we boiled the 1 lb. of baby octopus for about two minutes in the boiling papaya infused water. I then drained the octopus and threw out the water. We were taught by a Puerto Vallarta chef that the enzymes in the skin of the papaya will tenderize the octopus and that is the theory we were testing today.
For lunch I made a salad with the red lettuce from the garden and diced about ¼ of a cucumber and a Roma tomato and two green onions and cut up the rest of one of the octopi and the PPI halibut from last night and added croutons. I ate under the gazebo in the garden. A mourning dove sat on the pathway near me and watched me eat.
I took a nap in the afternoon. At 4:00 and 5:00 I watched the business news and then Suzette and I went to the garden and picked about two dozen ripe snow peas. I then went to meditate at 6:00 and returned at 7:00 and brought two Negra Modelos from the garage fridge.
Upon returning I found that Suzette had chopped onion, ginger, asparagus, and yellow squash. I then took up the knife and chopped three cloves of garlic and dissected and diced the octopus. There were globs of gelatinous stuff around the octopus that I had never seen before.
Suzette made a seasoning sauce with mushroom soy, Chinese rice wine, Japanese rice vinegar, honey and oyster sauce and added the gelatinous octopus liquid into the seasoning sauce. She then sautéed the garlic, ginger, onion in chili oil and the PPI oil from last night’s meal that was still in the pan. After a couple of minutes she added the diced vegetables and snow peas and cooked them for a couple of minutes. Then she added the octopus and then the seasoning sauce.
Suzette heated a handful of penne pasta and then we ladled the stir fried octopus in vegetable sauce into pasta bowls.
We took our plates and beers to the Garden table to eat.
We both agreed that the octopus was the most tender we had ever tasted. This recipe was a huge success. We finally found a way to cook tender octopus.
The beer cut the picante flavor of the light sauce pretty well, although the sauce had a decidedly spiced flavor.
After dinner we harvested some of the abundant lavender we have growing up in the garden this year.
Bon Appetit
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