Serious Eats: Recipes
Dinner Tonight: Roasted Squid with Chili Oil
So this week has turned into unofficial squid week here, though I swear I cooked this meal before Michele Humes shared her Squid Noodle Salad recipe. I find it interesting because, while I'm sure I've munched on the odd bit of fried calamari at some point, I haven't actually purchased squid from the grocery store in nearly two years—and that's really my loss.
For my reintroduction I picked out a recipe from a recent Bon Appetit issue. Squid is surprisingly simple to work with, especially if you buy it pre-cleaned. Really, it's not intimidating at all, plus it has a really addicting clean ocean flavor. In this dish it's paired with garbanzo beans and frisée. I worried about the bitter greens mucking up the dish and distracting from the flavors, but it provided a nice counterpoint to the heat of the chili oil.
What is chili oil? I wasn't quite sure and the recipe (which calls for a tablespoon of it) didn't really explain. Chinese cuisine uses a decent amount of chili oil but this recipe looked far more Italian than Asian. Sure, I could have bought a bottle at Whole Foods, but the idea of plopping down cash for the scant tablespoon seemed a little ridiculous.
Luckily, I found this Giada De Laurentiis recipe—a quick infusion of red chili flakes and extra-virgin olive oil that couldn't have been simpler. You can half or quarter this recipe and still have more than enough. I'm not sure it was exactly what the recipe called for, but the spicy oil added a nice punch.