Tuesday 8 July 2008

Octopus and Octopussy

I went over to Sarah's place for dinner tonight, and we made two octopii from the Covered Market. It was a mess, but ultra-fun - first, we had to sever the tentacles and throw those into the pan, and then we had to turn each octopus inside out to remove the beak so we could dice up the body. (It sounds weird, but it's surprisingly intuitive when you do it.) Sarah's octopus was really tidy and looked edible, while mine spilled out all of its organs, blew ink all over my hands, and eventually resembled something I would have picked apart in Mr. Fletcher's sophomore biology class. But eventually, we got both of them into a pan with a splash of rosé and sautéed them for almost an hour (it turns out that squid cook quickly, while octopii are tricky and we are rockstars for successfully cooking them) before stir-frying the meat with vegetables and mixing it with penne. It was delicious. And then we watched Gordon Ramsay curse at people on TV, and we could shake our heads and be like, I think our dinner was better, and it was actually plausible.

And tomorrow, I'm getting my visa for the Philippines in London (!) and chaperoning the Fiction into Film class on their trip to the Ian Fleming exhibit at the Imperial War Museum. I had big plans to read all of the Bond novels as I taught this summer, but then I realized that I would be too busy writing lesson plans and picking on cartoon characters to do any reading for pleasure. Still, I'm stoked to explain the finer points of Moonraker to a captive audience, and that makes it all worth it.

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