Here's a first for the year. I prepared and made a squid dish. No seriously, I never made squid before today. It was the random shopping ingredient for December.
The quality of fresh squid, like most seafood, is easy to tell from visual and olfactory cues. It shouldn't have a strong nor fishy smell, be firm and shiny, and its outer membrane should be gray in color, not pink or purple. That is, of course, if you are using fresh squid. I suppose that at some point my squid was fresh. Since I didn't use it the same day I bought it, the squid had characteristics of not-so-fresh squid, as in I left it in the freezer for about a month then thawed it before preparation.
Preparing whole squid is a lot like shelling sunflower seeds: lots of effort, little reward. To put it bluntly, the only parts of the squid that is used in cooking are the tentacles and mantle (the skin, aka the tube). Just about everything else (head, guts, the hard beak, ink sack, cuttlebone) is removed and discarded. I didn't notice the ink sack when I prepared the squid. Squid ink is edible and is often used to add color to pasta, such as black linguini.
To make the calamari-shaped rings, cut the squid body into bite-sized pieces, horizontally. Here are other ways of preparing squid.
Squid can get tough if it's overcooked, so if you plan to fry it, do so on high heat with the pan already warmed up. I used 2 tbsp of olive oil for frying and added the squid just as the oil was able to spread across the pan easily. Probably no more than 5 mins for frying. Then remove it from the heat and plate it up.
The best tasting fried squid is how my folks make it--with chopped chives from their garden.
