Geia Sas! That’s Greek for Hello! We’re continuing our GREEK chapter with a bit of night-life. This is a great recipe for when you want to serve something…eclectic, shall we say?
Riddle Me This: What has 8 limbs, and tastes like chewing gum without the sugar?
YUM!! I mean Yup, you guessed it… OCTOPUS!
Don’t be alarmed. It’s already dead. We made octopus soup 3 weeks ago from our big blue Greek cookbook. Not exactly the best idea on a hot day, but better to do a test-run before we get into the colder seasons of capital-area New York. Besides, seafood is best caught in the summer months anyhow.
We wanted to cut down on the salt and sodium, so we opted for 6 bottles of store-bought clam juice instead of fish/seafood stock. It seemed risky, but was well worth it to cut down the tang of that dry red wine we found.
For those of you who don’t know, wine is either dry, semi-dry or sweet. This just refers to how much sugar was burned off or not in the fermentation process. Ours was a dry red, which means red grapes were used and all of the sugar was burned off. The wood and the grape skins give a bitter taste of tannin. This happens mostly in red wines, tea, cinnamon, and acai berries.
We also have a disclosure to make: We don’t drink anything alcoholic, so my mom’s rule of broomstick was a bit hard for us. The rule states; one must taste the wine and like it before adding it into any sort of cooking or baking because the taste will stick around in the finished product, even if it won’t get you buzzed. We didn’t like the wine we chose at all. Red was the smart choice for color and goes well with octopus in terms of flavor profile, but I felt if we had gone with something sweeter-but not too sweet, it would have made a difference in first tastings. This is why after we tried some of our finished soup, we added a small palm’s worth of sugar to the pot. (It’s a Sicilian thing. You see it in the movie “Moonstruck” with Cher. I’m an eighth Sicilian through my paternal grandfather’s side.)
We wanted to try something new and healthy. In the produce section, we spotted a couple containers of zoodles.
You remember that pasta maker contraption where you stuck vegetables in the middle of it and cranked it like spaghetti. They claim that people don’t know the difference, but that underestimates human intelligence. Noodles made from zucchini never taste like typical egg and flour noodles. The zucchini noodles we found were firm enough to hold in the broth, but I wouldn’t use them again. They added no flavor at all to it. Maybe the beet or carrot zoodles would have been a better option, that way we wouldn’t have to add the extra carrots in for sweetness. We still decided to add in some fettuccine alongside. This really added some fullness to the soup unlike the other vegetables while also acting as a vehicle to carry the flavor.
All and all, we would say this one needs improvement, but that’s how we learn everything about cooking if it isn’t textbook. Maybe we could find something that tastes less Italian and more GREEK. Lemon, feta and other pungent flavors covered in olive oil. Nice oregano, but this tasted much more like Mediterranean in general. In my opinion, it needs to scream louder, give a bigger bite, like something was inexplicably missing. It matters some about origin, (That’s how you get fusion cooking) but flavor is what wins me over every time. For me at least, we’re learning about what we like, we’re getting better at making elements, but we need to work on our complex pieces.
This one wasn’t too hard per say, but for us this was a first. We have the formula down, BS: Boil & Simmer. As we get on, I’m sure we’ll get better. But for now, it’s a good start.