Week Nine – Squid

Right, it’s Week Nine and it’s time to get tough.

Last week, I ate a grand total of one cockle as my new food.  This is clearly not acceptable.  I know that it took about an hour to chew the cockle enough to be able to swallow it, but I’m not sure eating a solitary mouthful of something is enough to count as being horizon-expanding – Even if it was gross.  I need to man up (whilst finding another phrase to describe manning up – Something doesn’t sit right saying ‘man up’) and eat every last bit of whatever it is I find to eat each week.  That’s when the character-building will happen…  I will become a better, more rounded person when I have to force myself to down a whole jar of a hundred or so slimy, gritty, vinegary bivalves or eating thousands of gelatinous, black fish eggs.  That’s the whole point of this new food experiment.

To me, this makes perfect sense; to you, it probably doesn’t.  Well, actually, it doesn’t make much sense to me either, but, I guess, it makes this new food a week challenge a bit more, well, challenging…

The upshot of this amendment is that I’ll probably vomit more than usual, but will avoid wasting food – This can only be a good thing.

As a result, this week, I will be eating 111g of squid in a squid ink sauce – Well, 111g less the weight of the tin and outer box.

The box instantly offended my OCD tendencies…  The picture and writing on the back of the box was upside down in relation to that on the front.  It shouldn’t bother me, but it did.

Maybe I was just looking for a reason not to eat tentacle…  Maybe I’m just a bit mental….  Or a combination of the two – Yes, that’s right, I’m clearly mentacle!

Recession-busting tip: Invest in squid – I spent just over a pound on a tin and, looking at the picture on the box, there seemed like there was more squids in there than that. Profit!

Squid Facts (including an exciting anecdote)

• Squid are marine-dwelling cephalopods.  It comes from the Greek – kephalópoda – Which literally means ‘head-feet’ – I’m no expert, but, they definitely don’t have feet.

•  They have three hearts.

•  They can change colour to suit their surroundings.

• They produce a black ink as a defence mechanism – An underwater smokescreen, of sorts, designed to obscure a predator’s view in order to facilitate escape.   In the case of this particular squid, it clearly didn’t work as it ended up in a tin.

• This got me wondering…  The only time I have eaten ink before was when a pen I was chewing leaked into my mouth.  At the time, I just thought I’d probably bitten the end a bit too forcibly, but what if the pen was trying to distract me so that it could make its escape?  What if it had deliberately squirted ink onto my lips and tongue in a self-preservation bid?  That would be something special wouldn’t it?  The unfortunate result of this was that the pen was thrown in the bin and I got to spend the rest of the afternoon looking a bit like Gene Simmons from the band Kiss.  It seems like we were both losers in this scenario.

I initially wanted to syphon off the ink and then drink it, but it turned out to be a bit too gelatinous and sunk to the bottom of the oily tomato-flavoured part of the liquid.  I decided to pass on this, although not before making a right mess of the kitchen.

The squid, whilst looking a bit like bird poo on the plate or that gunk that gets put in a beaker in an anti-smoking advert, was pretty good – and tasted an awful lot better than it looked.   I expected it to be chewy and fishy, but wasn’t.  Instead, it was quite meaty and mostly tasted of the tomato sauce.

I managed to eat the contents of the tin – just about.

If I’m going to have to eat all of the new food each week, I probably need to not do it after eating dinner.  In this case, squid just doesn’t cut it as a dessert.

Well, that’s Week Nine out of the way…  Please do suggest something exciting I can eat next week.