This time, we chose a low and slow simmering stuffed calamari so that everything could blend together into one cohesive dish as opposed to having separate components combined at the end. The frozen calamari was already cleaned. All I had to do was pull out the tentacles and rinse.
Meanwhile, I went straight to work on the stuffing. We followed Nona’s Kitchen instructions to a tee. Lauren’s processor worked great on her left-over stale bread heels. I must say, I was unimpressed with the stuffing. She used the same basic stuffing and bread crumbs as every other house cook.
When I think of a good stuffing, there’s more than eggs, parsley and bread crumbs. I want to improvise, like a Thanksgiving turkey stuffed with mushrooms, cranberries and celery. If it were me creating the recipe, I would use leafy greens and carrots to mix it up a little, maybe use some sausage. Her list was dull at best and we found out later that her idea of using milk wasn’t her greatest either. Fish stock really is the way to go. We really missed out not having any fish stock around the house. Moral of the story, it needed inspiration and some minor tweaking. Since vegan eggs are made of a sort of algae, would that have been a more tasteful binder? Regular chicken eggs are a perfect binder thanks to their protein structure, but what does that mean about algae? This implies further investigation at another time.
A few of the squid bodies were too piccoli to be stuffed, so we simply chopped them up as a little secret ingredient to the sauce similar to the fruite de marre at Francessca’s Restauranti in Boston. Having the pan at a lower heat made it easier for the sauce to marinate. We debated a bit of tomato paste to give it more of a pizza sauce texture, but ultimately saved ourselves the sodium and went without it.
By putting a cover over the sauce pot, we were able to utilize all 3 forms of heating; conduction from the fire heating the pan, convection from the heat cycling underneath the lid and radiation from the steam within. It was during this time that the tentacles began to curl. Since less heat escaped, the tentacles were able to curl with delight.
There was a true lack of flavor in the stuffing. We were sure to add salt and pepper, but the seasoning was far too miniscule. Perhaps if we had included cayenne pepper, or some dried herbs, we may have gotten more of a hit, since squid taste so skin-like. It may be rich in vitamin B 12 and riboflavin, but seriously, there is no such tangy, sour, sweet or any sort of flavor to squid. Your seasoning has to be on target or it will be bland. Remember this bit of blunt alliteration: Bland is boring.
Most of what we did taste was breaded scrambled eggs in squid rolls. It was even squishing and expanding out of their pockets in the pan. Our elementary tomato sauce was loaded with hearty garlic, a handful of onion and some gorgeous fresh parsley. Thank goodness that had so many flavors, or we would have had mush in our mouths. Maybe mixing in some panko would show some improvement. All and all, we give this one a fair 80%.