Squid Pro Quo

People either hate calamari or love calamari; never in between. People who love it swear it is worth the cost and the trouble to prepare. The people who hate it hate it to the point of having that thick feeling in the back of their throats that usually comes just before vomiting.

To be fair, though I love calamari, you've really got to wonder what the first guy to eat it was thinking. What kind of long, drawn-out famine was going on in the world that would inspire someone to cook this up, put it in their mouth and chew.

If you hate calamari, you may as well click onto your next blog.

If you love calamari, then you may as well get into your car, drive to Virginia, hit I-81, get off at the Edinburg exit, make a left off the ramp and take this to Main Street. Make a left on Main Street and right there you will see Sal's Italian Bistro. I guarantee it will be the best calamari you've ever eaten. Ever.

The reason I send you to Sal's instead of encouraging you to follow my "recipe," is that my recipe sucked big time.

All the elements were there except for:

• Sal gets his seafood fresh by driving to the docks every morning, I could only find frozen at Martin's;
  
• Sal managed to find a fresh chili pepper while I could only find shriveled red "moderately hot" pepper at Martin's;
• Sal may (I stress may) use the Nigella method of dredging the calamari in corn starch rather than flour. On the slim chance I try this again, I'll try it with corn starch.
  
• Sal. Just like I knew not to order the calamari on Sundays because Sal isn't doing the cooking on Sunday. Sal -- or a successful Sal-in-training -- is crucial.
  

Anyway, unless I can find a fresh source for calamari, I won't be trying this again. And I hate the deep fried breaded things you find everywhere else.

Not that it was horrible -- it just wasn't worth the effort and expense.

Guess I'll just have to keep going to Sal's -- a rather happy outcome for a failed experiment!




Added later: I had nothing to do with this.