THE SQUID AND I

 

In general I’m constitutionally, perhaps pathologically, incapable of following a recipe, but when I saw a recipe in the Times mag for Stuffed Squid with Chickpeas by Tomos Parry (officially a ‘great British chef’) my kitchen companion (that would be Caroline) and I thought we might have a go at it.  

There was a message on the magazine page saying ‘For Good Cooks Only!’ but I’m not a man to be detered by a flying exclamation mark.

 

I reckon I can cook squid but I’d never stuffed one before and I’d never baked one either, pan frying is what I do, but the squid in the picture looked so good I decided I’d go down the stuffing and roasting route.

 

Basically you make a risotto: the obvious stuff plus the chopped squid tentacles and then  - and this is the beauty part - some black pudding.

 

Tomos reckons one squid per person but obviously his were small.  We got one big one that would probably have served three.

 

I could see there might be problems getting the risotto inside the beast but it proved easy enough. The recipe advised pricking small holes in the squid with a cocktail stick and then holding the open end together with another, or possibly the same, cocktail stick. This seemed like a good idea so I obeyed.

 

Tomos said to bake for 20 minutes but I couldn’t see that would be enough to produce the fine colour seen in the magazine photograph, so we decided to give it a bit longer and we began by rubbing some turmeric and paprika on the outside. It still never achieved the golden look I was hoping for but very likely Tomos has a fiercer oven than I do.

 

While the squid was roasting we cooked a bed of onions, chickpeas and actual peas, 

then sliced up the squid 

and lay it on the base, and the end result looked like this. 

In the Nicholson kitchen that counts as success, and a successful recipe.

 

If I made it again I’d use more black pudding, possibly a lot more, but apart from that I’d do what I was told by the recipe.

 

As a result, one might almost be tempted to go to Tomos Parry’s restaurant Brat in Shoreditch which looks like this:

 

In fact stuffed roasted squid wasn’t on the menu when I checked, possibly because the restaurant specializes in ‘open fire cooking.’  Still, the lamb chop with grilled sweetbreads for £14.50 sounds like a bargain.  

PRETTY AS A PLATING

I saw this thing on Jay Rayner’s Instagram: “The best tasting food is rarely the most beautiful” - and I’ve been wondering if this is true.

I think Rayner's a good egg, and I’m definitely prepared to give his opinion some credence , especially since the other night I had this stuffed squid at Josephine’s:

 I thought it tasted great, but I’m sure some diners would have been put off by the way it looked. Well, that’s their problem, innit?

Certainly I like food that looks good, as when the beloved Anne Fishbein photographs it for LA Weekly, though I sometimes suspect the food looks better in her photographs than it tastes in reality:

I certainly don’t like prettified food, but ugliness per se isn’t a guarantee that something will taste good. This kebab didn’t look good and didn’t taste good either, but I’m sure others might have thought differently on both counts:

And then of course you get all those kitschy, and sometimes horrifying, old food ads that people on the internet seem to love, like this:

 and this:

And usually anything that involves Jello gets a lot of flak online, but you know, this image may be pretty strange looking:

But you know it contains cottage cheese, vinegar, onion, mayonnaise, lime and seafood salad.  I’ll bet it tastes great.