the best dinner I've ever cooked

Yum!

I'm a little worried seriously concerned that I'll still be full tomorrow morning when I wake up to run. What'd I make?

Calamari with mushrooms and capers over greens in a goat cheese dressing. I'm calling it Liz's Awesome Dinner for short. I don't have a recipe that I can point you to, so let me tell you the story of how I made it up instead.

1.) I'd been seriously craving squid for a long time and my dinner at La Hacienda on Friday night merely held me over for a while but didn't fully satisfy the craving. (I was pretty careful this time about not letting Amanda steal my squid too.)

2.) Squid was on sale (I guess, what is a normal price for squid?) at the Co-op.

3.) I bought goat cheese yesterday. (Goat cheese should really become a staple of my diet.)

4.) I really wanted salad. I crave salad about as often as I crave seafood so I usually honor my desires.

5.) I had to go to the YWCA today which is only notable in that it got me out of the house and near the co-op to begin with.

I trawled around the web for some good calamari/squid/whatever-you-call-it recipes. Fried didn't sound good to me (read: frying food at home didn't sound good to me) and I don't own a grill. So I was left with broil/bake/roasting or the pan-seared/saute option. I found some recipe for baked squid with potatoes and olives and I thought I'd try that.

When I got to the co-op though, they had these local greens that I bought for my salad craving, and then I noticed the local mushrooms (which I supplemented with shitake mushrooms that are decidedly not local). At that point, I remembered I had capers at home and decided to do a piccata-like thing instead of the recipe I'd found.

I got home with my squids (frozen of course) and first had to learn how to thaw them properly. I did the bowl/change-the-water method which worked well and didn't waste a ton of water.

I sauteed my mushrooms and carefully added the capers right at the end.

I chopped the squid into rings (in a big WIN for me, the tentacles had been pre-separated and the eyes were already gone) and marinated the rings and tentacles for a while. I had to sear the squid pieces a few at a time so they could all make contact with the bottom of the pan. (This is the one part of this entire blog post it's ok for Mark, my cousin the chef, to read. He'd probably cringe at the rest of it.)

After all the saute magic, I added the "piccata" mix into the squid.

Then I created my own salad dressing or olive oil, red wine vinegar and goat cheese and added it to my yummy locally grown greens. I added the seafood mix and sprinkled with Parmesan. It was so good. Sorry to my friends reading this who don't eat squid for religious reasons. Not sorry to anyone reading this who just thinks squid is gross. You don't know what you're missing. Besides being yummy, my squids were a good source of important nutrients like copper and selenium (I'm sure I'll need those for something).