Star Tribune from Minneapolis, Minnesota • Page 31

1 a 1 Minneapolis Tribune May2819811C i tin iiii it i i Squid hasn't been getting the kind of ink it deserves By Kate Parry Staff Writer It's cheap, high in protein and versatile. What's more, it's a food that appears everywhere from the fisherman's cottage to the gourmet table in most countries. So why is it that the United States, which harvests about 1 5,000 tons of squid each year, ships most of it to Europe and Asia? "Part of the problem is Americans in general. We've grown up liking our food all prepackaged with the guts taken out," said Tom Brezsny, spokesman for Friends of the Calamari (squid). The name of the group might lead you to believe it is concerned with protecting the squid.

Not exactly. The Friends, based in Santa Cruz, promote squid as a food and art form. They held a festival for it last year and figured about 500 people might show up, Brezsny said. Even though it was on a Monday, 2,500 people turned out to eat squid and be entertained by what the Friends called a squid punk band, the Calamari Chorus and a modern squid morality play. Local artists created pottery and glasswork with a squid motif.

Some of it is published in a catalog the Friends of the Calamari put out. It features the Squid Calendar, which shows models clad in squid. This year they are expecting 10,000 people and the festival is to last two days (August 22 and 23). The Santa Cruz Art Center contains a permanent gift shop of squid-related art. Even the beloved lutefisk has never known such glory.

Brezsny is not, however, a squid snob. Half of his efforts to promote squid have a tongue-in-cheek quality to them. The rest have a squid-in-cheek quality, since he is part owner of a restaurant that serves a lot of the ten-legged creature. He knows what he's up against. "American have this thing about the yuckiness of squid." But he's still optimistic.

"The cleaning process is a very simple one squid aren't red blooded. I've cleaned hundreds of pounds of squid and I can actually say I enjoy it now." You've probably seen it in seafood counters at the grocery store. Beyond the neat rows of sole and red snapper, beyond the piles of colorful crab legs and pink shrimp is a bowl of blue-grey goo. That's squid. It suffers from squiggliness in its unbooked form.

It could be the squid pro quo for a bowl of cold spaghetti in a horror house. But once cooked, it becomes firm although not very chewy unless it is overcooked. People in other countries eat a lot of it. So do whales. In fact, marine biologist Malcolm Clarke of England estimated in 1978 that whales consume enough squid to equal the weight of mankind each year.

The squid is made up of basically three parts the triangular piece on one end (caudal fins), the cone (tail section) in the center and the head and tentacles or legs. Inside the cone there is one bone and an ink sac. The squid squirts the ink as a smoke screen while fleeing enemies. The smaller and younger the squid, the more tender it will be. Avoid it if it is very slimy and limp.

To clean it, grab the tentacles with one hand and pull that section out of the tail section. Cut the tentacles from the head right in front of the eyes. Clean out the cone section, carefully removing the ink sac, which can create a mess if it's punctured. Take out the one piece of bone actually cartilage. At this point you have a hollow, cone-shaped piece of squid that can be sliced into rings for tempura, stuffed or sliced down one side so that it forms a flat piece of squid.

The tentacles are edible, too. The thin, blueish skin should be removed it comes off if you rub the squid. Akio Kuga, owner and cook at Asuka Japanese restaurant, 24 N. 7th learned to cook squid about 20 years ago when he lived in Japan. He serves squid as sashimi raw fish or as tempura, fried with a light batter, in his restaurant.

He likes squid because it is versatile. He warned against overcooking it and said that other than that it is easy to use. Sometimes dried squid is formed into a bottle shape and used to hold sake. One absorbs the flavor of the other, he said. Plus, you can eat the bottle.

He pulled out several Japanese cookbooks and translated some recipes. The pages were dotted with photographs of squid intricately Squid continued on page 1 2C Dining without dishes: Hand-to-mouth existence can be fun won't want to put it in a dishwasher anyway. "Well, then," the practical among you are already muttering under your breaths, "what's stopping you from using paper plates?" "Oh, really," the stylish among you are muttering back at the practical. "Paper plates for a dinnerparty? Very tacky. Besides, they buckle.

And they're hard to juggle on your knee." Now, stop that muttering, you two. We have an answer. Dishless dishes food served in containers made of other food that you can hold in your lap and that are at least easily disposable, and in some cases fully, deliciously edible. Not just appetizers, mind you, but a meal. Not finger food hand food.

It's a nice solution any time, but particularly in warm weather when you can serve it all outside and not even worry about crumbs and bits of food falling to the ground. Eitler way, indoors or outdoors, with all the food arrayed on a table, guests can just wander over and help themselves to things one or two at a time and eat them with some ease wherever they please. Dishless dishes continued on page 2C By Al Sicherman Staff Writer Picture a dinner party. Lots of people and lots of good food. Afterwards, dessert, maybe a few drinks and plenty of good talk into the evening.

Then, hours after the dining is done, when the last guest has left and the house lights come up, there they are: The dishes. With luck they're in the kitchen, and with incredible luck they might have been scraped off by some martyr among the guests. More likely, however, they're sitting on the table in the little stacks somebody always manages to start, plates fused together by congealed sauce, forks stuck forever in mounds of petrified vegetables. Now comes the awful choice. Do you clean them off before going to bed, although you're already tired from cooking all day and serving and being charming all evening; or do you wait until the next morning, when the salad and chicken leftovers will be well along, and everything else will have turned to concrete? A dishwasher helps, of course.

But unless you believe in fairies, too (if you do, clap your hands), you probably don't put much faith in instructions that say you can load it full of dishes with "soft food" left on them. And if you've trotted out your wedding china for the party, you 0.0 LOR.