Squid Curry
“what’s for lunch?” is a commonly asked question early morning in the kitchen. Not the lunch on our menu but our staff lunch meal that we eat between shifts at 5 pm. Sometimes it’s pasta with dried up and brown herbs, sometimes it’s braised Asian cabbage, a lot of times it’s vegetarian curry. Our meal depends on what we need to get rid off in the cool room and it should be really quick to prepare. Whatever the meal is, it’s the highlight of our day (how funny though).
Last Wednesday was particularly slow and the chef had a bunch of meetings. When the cat is away, the kitchen mice will play. The guys were arguing how they’d cook the squid for our meal. First it was squid curry with lentils. I nudged the girl next to me and told her that that sounded horrible. So when the guy asked if we were Ok with that we said NO. He said that he’d fry it off first before he puts it in the curry so it wont be rubbery. Someone else suggested that he just put the fried squid on the side. This is where the boys got excited and discussed at length what to do with squid for a full 15 minutes…Pa fancy ng pa fancy (yes, battered seafood is fancy for us because there’s no way they’d use someone’s time to stand over the deep fryer to baby our food on a normal day)
What if…”we put them in a batter?”
Yes, that would be nice. “what if we put them in beer batter and deep fry them?”
Do we have beer? “ooh, let’s put them in the mexican beer that we have. mexican calamari”
“So what’s your beer batter recipe? Mine is with a little bit of cornstarch…” Yes, mine too. Put flour on the squid first”
“put flour on the squid first” Why are you so obsessed about flour on the squid? “because the batter won’t stick, I’ve tried it before”
They look for the beer and deep fry our squid. A few minutes later….
2 minutes later…
“Oh! Oh! We should have done a tempura!!”
Too late.
