My Lunch Can Beat Up Your Lunch!

Lunch Box 161: Tako o Taita!

 
   
 

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I'd like to be under the sea I wish to impress upon the many and sundry the fearsome degree of my hardcore-ness. For this lunch, I have cooked octopus! Not storebought packaged cooked octopus, but real baby occies cleaned and cooked all by myself, with not even a recipe to help me!

Are you impressed yet?

Cleaning octopus is not a difficult task, but it does remind me of high school biology class. If you've cleaned a chicken or fish you know what I mean. I used baby octopi because I heard that the adults are tough, and you have to beat 'em with a hammer if you don't want to be eating rubber. Baby octopi are tender and require no pulverization. Well and good, but if you have one large octopus you only have to clean it once, and the bits are large enough for you to distinguish easily. Baby occies, you have to clean ten or however many of 'em you have, and guesstimate where the guts end and the regular body begins. Still, it wasn't that much of a task.

Another neat thing about cooking octopus: the tentacles curl during cooking. I knew that, but I was still startled when I put them in the pan and they started writhing! It's a good thing I'm not squeamish. I only wish I could have made a video of that.

Wow, that's appetizing talk. It was worth it in the end. The octopus - which I sauteed in butter on the principle that you can never go wrong with sauteeing seafood in butter, and served with some konnyaku noodles* that came in cool little bundles - was tasty and neato-ish. Not hugely filling, as they shrunk during cooking. But that's why we have things like steamed green beans, baked Japanese sweet potato, boiled egg, stir-fried teriyaki tofu, and fruit salad with strawberries, kiwi fruit, and rambutans.

* Yeah, I know that konnyaku in noodle form is called shirataki, but the package said konnyaku, so I'm sticking with that.

Wanna talk about it?