Like, Gag Me With a Spoon

Saturday was our shellfish class. I was apprehensive about this class because shellfish and I don't always get along. Shrimp is lovely -- I have no quarrel with shrimp. I've spent many a Christmas Eve peeling and deveining shrimp. Same thing goes for lobster. But oysters, clams, mussels and the like freak me the fuck out.

I find them hard to swallow, literally, even when they're cooked, and the idea of consuming them raw gives me the heebie jeebies. Julie and I spent two weeks traipsing around Spain back in the day, and I picked everything that lived inside a shell off of every plate of paella that was put in front of me.

When Chef Barbara asked the requisite questions: "Do we have any vegans? Vegetarians? Is there anyone who doesn't feel comfortable handling raw shellfish? Is there anyone who would like to leave when I brutally murder the lobster?" she also asked if there was anyone who had never tried raw oysters before. I raised my hand.

"Will you try one today?" she asked.

"Maybe," I replied.

And I did. And I found the texture gross but the taste delightful. I'm conflicted. I even ate cooked clams and mussels, but still found them kind of nasty.

That wasn't the grossest part of my day, though. Neither was the lobster murder. The most disturbing part was when we each had to grab a handful of squid and prep them for cooking.



Here's how you dismantle a squid. You grip the tentacles right near the eyes, where they start, and yank. This pulls the innards out of the body cavity. There's a spiny thing that feels like plastic that also slides right out. Sometimes you need to go back into the body cavity and pull out some stuff that got left behind. Then you squeeze around the tentacles to push the mouth back into its head, and cut right at the base of the tentacles (if you don't do the squeeze, you'll end up with the mouth, which is inedible). The hollow body cavity is what gets sliced up into rings to make friend calamari, and the tentacles are what freaks you out when you see them on your plate of fried calamari.

That whole process may have been gross for you to read, but it was actually pretty fun to do. When I started working through my pile, I noticed one of my squid was rather large. My brain told me not to think about it, to just save it for last. I quickly dismantled the rest of my squid, though, and was forced to turn my attention toward the big guy.

I knew why he was so big, and I could not deal with it at all. I grabbed onto the tentacles to get ready for pulling, and when I gripped the body cavity, I felt it -- a fish that the squid had swallowed right before being caught. And he was stuck. I tugged a few more times and then started to feel a bit faint.

"I can't deal with this," I said, finally, putting my knife down. My classmate, Terry, offered to remove the fish. I owe her big time. Meanwhile, at the other table, Kat was also trying to wrangle not one, but three fish out of the belly of her squid. I did not offer to help, but I did suggest she use, and procure, a spoon, which did the trick and I wished I'd thought of it ten minutes earlier.

Later, I found out that breading and deep frying squid is much more enjoyable than finding partially-digested fish in their raw bodies. And eating it was the best part -- I even got over my squeamishness and chowed down on the tentacles. Yum.