Chilled Seafood Salad with Herbed Olive Oil (Page 155)

RECIPE #1127

• Date: Monday, March 15, 2010 -- 6pm
• Location: Berkeley, CA
• Kitchen: Our Temporary California Home
• Dining Companion: Matty
• Recipe Rating: B-
  

I chose this recipe as part of the All Seafood All The Time plan. I started by making the herbed olive oil. I blended together extra-virgin olive oil, parsley, chives, rosemary, and salt. Then I cooked the seafood. I boiled salted water and cooked some peeled and deveined shrimp until just cooked through. I then transferred the shrimp to a bowl of ice and cold water. I then added some scallops to the boiling water and cooked them until just cooked through. I transferred the scallops to the ice water, then added squid tentacles and squid rings to the boiling water. I cooked the squid for about 30 seconds, then added it to the ice water bath. I drained all the seafood, then chilled it for an hour. I then tossed the seafood with some lemon juice and lemon slices and refrigerated another hour. I sprinkled the seafood with sea salt, drizzled with the herbed oil, and served. I am having trouble judging this dish fairly. On the one hand, it wasn't bad. The seafood was perfectly cooked, and the lemon and sea salt complemented it nicely. The herbed oil was unobjectionable. On the other hand, this was pretty much the last thing my special gentleman and I felt like eating after months of eating pretty much nothing but seafood. This dish was in-your-face seafood. The seafood wasn't watered down with things like vegetables, or carbs. It was just a bowl full of seafood, with a little oil on top. The two of us stared at it for a while, then with a deep sigh, started eating it. It wasn't bad, but it also didn't taste good enough to overcome my strong desire not to eat it. At a different time, we might have liked this ok, but this was definitely not the thing to make three months into the All Seafood All The Time plan.

[Special note from my special gentleman: If leftover seafood salad is left in a tupperware in one's office for a week, unrefrigerated, then brought home and put down the garbage disposal without running it thoroughly afterwards, the resulting smell the next day will be very unpleasant. I missed it when it happened, but I believe him. His story is confirmed by our roommate Josh, who adds that the smell was so bad he had a nightmare about it days later.]

The recipe is here.

It's true, at this point I am tired of eating seafood. But my special gentleman is only living in California for another two months, so I need to keep my eye on the prize and continue cooking seafood recipes while I can! If I go back to the Midwest in June with dozens of seafood recipes left to make, I am going to have a problem! I am making progress though -- tonight I made two recipes from the Fish and Shellfish section for dinner, and now, for the first time in a long time, the Fish and Shellfish section is not my lowest percentage section in The Book. I have cooked 74.7% of the recipes in the Fish and Shellfish section, which puts it above both the Poulty section (72.1%) and the Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb section (74.6%). Yay!! I am not worried at all about finishing the non-seafood meat sections, as meat is abundant in Michigan, so I am thrilled that the Fish and Seafood section has passed them by! If only there weren't so many seafood recipes left in other sections (e.g. Hors D'Oeuvres and First Courses, Soups, Salads, Sandwiches and Pizzas, Pasta, etc...). Oh well! I will just continue cooking!