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As probably many heard that sea food in general is higher suggested by the Health Professionals than normal meat. It’s light for stomach digestion and normally very delicious too. What i dug on squid is that it is a perfect source of Selenium, Riboflavin and Vitamin B12. Quite a rare collection, huh?!

Moreover, I found an interesting article on Squid which tells us that lots of harmful bacteria “live happily in fish but avoid squid”. Squid has its own bacteria that defends itself from all the infections that paralyze all other fish-like species. This is amazing, dont you think?

From Now on, from all the sea food I feel like eating only squid!

And now…. Let’s make Squidy-Ready-Do Salad! (for 2 serving)

This dish is too simple, if you have squid which is already skinned. But if you start with a row un-skinned  squid (which is much better, if you want to make sure about safety of your ingredients), then you can refer to the article “How To Handle Squid In Your Kitchen” .

When squid is cut prepare the other very healthy ingredient – broccoli! One medium – to big size floret. Wash it and cut in such a way that all florettes are untouched. Just try to divide different florettes from each other. I love broccoli because of it’s always free and green and flowery look

Now, put the water to boil and add salt (1 tea spoon for 1 litr of water). First we gonna boil squid. Be aware that the less you boil squid or broccoli, the more vitamins you will eat.

15 seconds of squid boiling (the water should boil!). And then You can put broccoli to the same salty water and boil:

40 seconds.

Now – the sauce part. Mix all the given below ingredients: (spoon = sp = table spoon; tea spoon = tea sp)

1 sp of water

1 sp of sugar

2.2 sp of vinegar

0.5 sp of fish vinegar (the one against the fish smell)

1 sp of syrup (sugar syrup or so)

0.6 sp of soy sauce

0.3 sp of sesame oil

0.5 tea-sp of salt

0.3 sp of red pepper powder

1 tea-spoon of mustard.

You can put little more water if you wish, after mixing the sauce. It will look like very little for such amount of squid meat and broccoli, but believe me, its enough. When I made twice as what I suggest in the recipe, The remaining of sauce lasted for another 4-5 days! So, pls don’t repeat my mistakes!

Now, mix the boiled squid meat and broccoli with sauce and serve a table!

I hope you like it!

P/s: if you dont have fish vinegar, you may put simple vinegar instead!

I thought that this article will be very useful for those, who love making sea-food from fresh unready ingredients or for those, who love adventures with unknown food. For me it was the second. I have never cooked sea food before, therefore I can’t yet love it. But i really enjoy experiments in cooking. So, here is the story:

My honey bought fresh squid two days ago. It was surprisingly cheap on the market, so he didn’t hesitate to buy non-skinned one. Having an experience in the past of another squid that died in our fridge within 5 days from purchase (I should have put it into the frizzier), I decided to cook the new one immediately after i remembered about its existence in our refrigerator.

I have to warn you, Handling the Fresh Squid is not very pleasant procedure since it involves cutting flesh, removing eyes  and brrrr, therefore, you have to be prepared for anything. Get your cooking gloves (the soft plastic and transparent ones) and Relax. It doesn’t bite! Often..

You have to start from cutting out and removing the squid body from the tube. It won’t get removed unless you cut the its ligaments from inside. Continue pulling it out and get rid of everything from inside the tube, except for the meat part which is little harder than the rest of innards.

Here is the main part of squid:

As a beginner, it was really hard to know, what is edible and what is not because most of organs are of the same color as meat. I had printed out steps for cleaning, but pictures were not clear enough to identify different organs and parts. But anyway, from what I figured out by myself I was trying to cut it off as meat. The most horrible experience for me was trying to remove the eyeballs from the head. I knew I had to do it to use the whole head meat, but I just couldn’t do it due to being disgusted by the idea of removing someone’s eyes (Yeah, I can never work in a meat shop).

Moreover, I was quite puzzled when I removed the transparent plastic-like stick from the other side of the body tube. It is thin and really long! At first, i thought, maybe this stick is put inside of squid by people when they, suppose, grow them on their own squid farms. But later, I confirmed my another guess, that it was a squid bone, like human spine! I still keep it as a trophy of my 1st squid experience

Next step, I cut off arms/ tentacles, which I used to call “legs” before and voila, we are ready for skinning.

In order to effortlessly skin the squid parts you have to put salt on the skin surface. Don’t put too much and not too little too. You can also rub salt into the skin very little. And then, with the help of knife, old-kitchen-friend, start removing the skin. You will notice how thin and flexible it is. By the way, I didn’t skin the squid arms. And so far, the taste was fine.  So if you are tired of skinning, skip its arms. When you are done with skinning, you are ready to cut the meat.

There are quite a few guides on how to cut the squid. And if the squid meat has sufficient thickness, then you can accomplish all the prescribed designs. Otherwise, even being very careful, it is very easy to cut the meat through. Therefore, choice is all yours. I cut it in 3 types:

1. rings (obviously you cut the squid body or tube). Some people use knife, some people use kitchen scissors. The second is easier and less dangerous. But in case you are eager to make very thin rings, then you better operate with very sharp knife.
2. rectangles (which are previously surface-cut like a small square grid). You can cut the the straight lines little bit keeping your knife on certain angle. And then do the same lines approximately perpendicular to the 1st set of lines. If the meat is thick enough, you can do the same grid pattern on the other side of meat. After you are done with the grid cut the meat into rectangles of desired size.
3. sun-shape ring. At the end of the body tube where the hole is small enough you may cut very wide rings. Take that kind of ring and start cutting the outer edges close to the hole but not as close as to ruin it. Cut the same fashion around the whole circle and then turn it out. You will get very cute sun shape.

Probably there are other types of cutting squid meat, and you can try out on your own.

And now the most fun thing! It takes so little for squid to be cooked! Just around 15-30 seconds in BOILED water with SALT, and your squid is ready. Now you can put it into some sauce, or salad. Or instead of boiling, you can also fry it the way you want!

Bon apppetit!

Some of you probably know that young Spring Onion is called Scallions. This is a right name for the type of onion that we are going to use in our recipe.
Scallion is genuinely healthy ingredient for any salad, seasoning or fried food. It’s should be cooked for about 1-2 minutes. Overcooking it (or any other vegetable) will kill all the goodies in the ‘greenies’.
“A 60–g portion (three onions) is a rich source of vitamin C; a source of foliate, calcium, and iron; contains 400 μg of carotene; provides 1.8 g of dietary fiber; supplies 15 kcal (65 kJ)”, from encyclopedia.com. Moreover, it is said that green onions are great to help you control your weight and generally for health too.

Korean mini pizza:

Korean Pajan is the name for Korean style pizza. Its is very easy to make. The recipe is given for two people.

50-70 G of young Spring Onions
100 – 150 G of sea shell meat
50 G of carrot
50 G of Сourgettes (1/3 of medium size)
2 eggs
2 spoons of Flour (or Pajan mix, which is available in Korea)
little salt and black pepper

Wash young Spring Onions and  pill the onion bulb – which is the most time consuming task among everything else. In case you have green onions with slighter bigger bulb, you can slice it too, so that the size match the rest of the ingredients. 

Cut green onions (together with bulb and root) into 2-3 cm approximately.

If you got unopened sea shells, you can easily open them after boiling in salty water. Perfect size for the recipe is small or middle size sea shells like on the picture.

Carrot and Courgette should be thinly sliced.

And 1-2 minutes fried to make the slices soft enough for pizza.

Put together all the ingredients: cut onions, shell meat, fried carrots and courgettes. Mix well with eggs, flour, salt and pepper.

Fry the resulted mixture on the low heat with vegetable oil.

Serve with a bowl of rice, kimchi or any other side dishes.
This is very light dinner for two!
Enjoy

It is very important moment for me…. my first blog! I can’t wait to run it full and share it with friends and the rest of the world!
My plans are to make a healthy food blog that can educate health capacity of the ingredients that we cook from every day as well as share my recipes. Most of them are experimentation on the original recipe. Many things are similar. After all, what we can do with food items? Boil, fry, steam, bake, BBQ, cold BBQ, dry and water…. mix, blend, crush, cut, chop ….. is there anything else? I bet just more verbs that mean very similar to what was already mentioned. Therefore, let’s not go into details of recipe copyrights and start our healthy food journey!
Later, I will update my readers on healthy lifestyles in different parts of the world. As being healthy at different corners of the globe may vary. So, we’ll see how is that possible.
The list of evaluated restaurants in my area and the city will be available also together with Google Maps. Of course, I cant go beyond Seoul city or Korea, since I stay here.

Welcome to my blog again and thank you for visiting!