Wheat-free * Dairy-free * Gluten-free * Paleo ~~
I’m a Johnny-come-lately to the pleasure of calamari. For most of my life if you had offered them to me – my automatic response would have been “If I wanted to eat rubber bands, they certainly wouldn’t be the fish flavored ones!”
I think I started to change my opinion at Carmine’s, a family style restaurant. Someone ordered fried calamari for the table and insisted I try one. OMG! Who knew how delicious, tender, and non-rubber bandy they could be. I couldn’t stop eating them…and now I dream of them.
But that was fried calamari…let’s be honest if you fried fishy rubber bands and gave me a delicious dipping sauce for them , I might fall in love with them too. The transition to non-fried calamari came in a seafood cooking class. One of the dishes was a squid salad and one of my tasks was cleaning the squid (which I was awesome at) and after doing all that work, I had to try the dish. Okay, not love a first bite – but pretty good.
Fast forward to last week and I’m at the farmer’s market where the fish monger has fresh squid and some weird impulse seduced me to buy some. I think it was more to see if I remembered how to clean them (the class was several years ago) then to actually eat them. But here I am, a bunch of perfectly cleaned calamari and wondering what to do with them. This recipe was my answer…and an excellent answer it was!
BTW if you want a really speedy version of this recipe, just heat up your favorite spaghetti sauce and stir in some calamari slices and cook a minute or two until opaque.
Of course I serve mine with zuchetti, if you are not paleo or gluten free, you can use any kind of pasta.
Bon Appetit!
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