in an octupus’s salad with purslane
Well, I usually make this salad with octupuses.
(Look for the little red Matiz Gallego boxes of tinned octupus and sauté them in olive oil.)
Instead of octupus, yesterday I found beautiful local squid at the market that I battered in a 1:1 mix of flour and beer, fried in a shallow pan of olive oil, and placed on top of roasted haricots verts and quartered fingerlings (try 425 degrees for 20 minutes, shaking occasionally) and chopped purslane.
Toss the roasted beans and potatoes with olive oil, salt, and pimentón or crushed red pepper, then add the seafood and squeeze a few lemon wedges on top.
With the fried squid (it makes me sad that Americans usually associate calamari only with a tomato sauce, as it’s so lovely with yogurt or pesto or on its own), the delicate batter crunches, then the roasted potatoes give way, and the green beans snap.
Purslane, when you can find it (usually near the herbs at the market—be careful not to pick spurge when you are foraging for purslane) is perfect raw here, with tart, crunchy little leaves and buds sprinkled on at the end.
It’s about as composed a salad as I can stand, and you can let guests mix their portion on the plate if you like.
Similarly composed is my friend and former PBS colleague Cameron, who just arrived in Northern California. It’s great to watch Cameron and Morgan transition to this coast, and he was rocking an urban alpine look earlier this week,
maybe more likely to scale the mountain of green beans at markets (quite seriously, those two handle every new adventure, outdoorsy or otherwise, with aplomb).
The table of green did inspire me to make the octopus salad as I roamed this week’s largest farmers’ market. Pictured are green beans; I keep a sharp eye for slender haricots verts that work better in salad and located them at a neighboring vendor.
The downtown Santa Cruz market always has dramatic bouquets,
children dancing, somewhat mellowly, to local musicians,
and a stand with noteworthy flavors that change with the market offerings from frozen geniuses Scream Sorbet. This is their roasted corn sorbet.
At markets across the country, I always see the longest lines and happiest vendors at seafood stalls, which seem continuously busy during market hours.
Accordingly, my favorite stand at the local markets around Santa Cruz is H & H Fresh Fish, where I found the squid from Monterey Bay for yesterday’s salad, and on Wednesday,
with half the stand shucking oysters I find impossible to pass up,
I saw coon shrimp, often used as bait. (See the lovely squid above them?)
The shrimp’s stripes match the lines of thin noodles, and Wednesday night I made the dish I hold is better than scampi—hot or cold soba noodles with Momofuku scallion sauce (recipe) underneath sautéed shrimp that go well with the green onion tops and ginger.
Note: With these colorful shrimp, remove the shell, but keep the heads on for flavor (like crawfish, there is a specific way to savor the heads I’ll leave you to discover).
All of summer produce is cause for celebration, and with tomatoes also at their height of flavor, I made a California Caprese salad this week with lemony sorrel rather than basil between buffalo mozzarella and slices of heirlooms,
thinking how one small variation to a recipe can make it new, yet again…
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Posted by Kristen Taylor on Sunday, July 25th, 2010, 9:40 am * Filed in Food, light, Market, Santa Cruz. * Tags: kristen, kthread, taylor. Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 28th, 2010 at 3:28 pm
Ha, I might be one of those people who associates calamari with tomato sauce. (Fun fact about Ashley: She will only eat the “ring” pieces of calamari because the tentacles gross her out.)
What is the flavor of octopus? I just saw a bag of octopus-flavored chips at the Ko-mart here, and that seemed strange because it didn’t seem to have much flavor in the Japanese dishes we tried. (Mostly just chewy.)
Always a fan of roasted corn flavor! You’d think we would have that sorbet flavor out here…in the land of corn and all.
August 11th, 2010 at 3:38 pm
Hm, the tentacles are the best part (leaves more for us, though). I think I’d pass on the octupus-flavored chips like you did.
That roasted corn sorbet was really nice, and I’m not sure how to replicate it—at least there are so many nice frozen dessert options near you to make up for the absence of that flavor :)