Food Porn and Salt and Pepper Squid Recipe
I enjoy cooking, which my wife thinks is great. I like browsing through the cookbooks at the bookstore, and have more than once bought a book because I had started salivating over the pictures (usually because I went there on an empty stomach). I didn't make up the term, but I like to call nice pictures of food that make you want to eat it "food porn".
This weekend I did a bit of cooking and made an effort to present the food nicely and took some photos. My kitchen is a little dark so it's hard to get nice photos without using the flash (and without shaking the camera), so I might have to get the bedside table lamp in there when I'm cooking, and put in a 100W bulb (instead of the normal 25W one) to get some good photos. The other alternative is to pick up that Nikon D80 I'm waiting to get, since the bigger lens with a larger aperture on that won't require as much light to get a decent shot with the same light.
Salt and Pepper Squid Recipe
I finally worked out a Salt and Pepper squid recipe I'm happy with, it's a pretty simple concept but I had tried a few different variations before that didn't work out as well as I would have liked. I didn't do any measuring of the main ingredients, so I can't tell you the right amounts, but the rough recipe was:
- Heat a small frying pan and add two tablespoons of Szechuan pepper and one tablespoon of sea salt crystals. Heat until the salt starts to turn brown and the peppers are fragrant. Allow to cool.
- Grind the salt and pepper into a coarse powder using a mortar and pestle
- In a small bowl add the salt and pepper to a cup of flour and mix it well.
- Prepare your squid by scoring it with a cross-hatch pattern and cutting it into small, roughly 3x3cm, squares.
- In another bowl whisk an egg
- Now dunk the squid into the egg wash, then coat with flour, and deep-fry until golden brown (about 2-3 minutes)
- Eat
I used this recipe with just one squid tube, but had plenty of egg and flour left over. Obviously if you want to make more you will probably need more eggs, and more flour mix. Just keep to the same proportions of flour/salt and pepper and you'll be right!
You can adjust the proportion of salt and pepper depending on your taste preferences. Mine actually turned out a little too salty, I had an equal proportion of salt and pepper. I have reflected that above by specifying a larger pepper:salt ratio than I used.
Comments are disabled for this entry.