Before: a mere squid.
After: squid salad.
A few nights ago, A and I made squid salad. Or actually, A made the squid salad and I cleaned the squid (the Thai word for squid is plaa meuk).
I volunteered to do so, as it sounded like an adventure. Cleaning squid can be a very messy process. It’s actually pretty cool. Squid have a totally weird clear plastic-looking/feeling spine (or “quill”) that you have to remove; see the first photo here for an example. And don’t even get me started on giant squid. Giant squid rule. (A later described the cleaning process to a friend as “very Jules Verne.” It was.)
Anyhoo, a question: how much squid did we have at our disposal?
Answer: over four pounds.
Why, you may ask, would two people need four pounds of squid for a simple salad? They wouldn’t, of course. But four pounds is what you end up with when you — and by you I mean me — go the grocery store with the intention of buying one pound and then get your metric system rules messed up and purchase about 2 kilos of squid, which is in fact over four pounds.
(I knew that 1 kg = 2.2 lbs but got confused. I was mistakenly thinking about how 1 km = .6 miles, and so assumed I needed roughly twice as many kilos as we need pounds. Dumb mistake. I really only needed about a half a kilo, not two kilos. Live and learn.)
The squid salad was delicious. We froze the three leftover squid.