Seafood Paella

In addition to enjoying the bacon wrapped dates, Paul and I also made a seafood paella. We purchased mussels, shrimp and squid to include in the paella. 

Enjoy the photo montage of me prepping the raw squid. Don't say I didn't warn you.

I was wary at first.

You begin by removing the head and the internal organs in one fell swoop.

I think the face is warranted as I was pulling out the spine. Yerg.

Taking off the outer skin. I may have been screeching at this point.

Okay, phew. Last step of chopping up the body into rings.

Yup, it was pretty intense. After I did one, it was easy to do the others, following the directions in Mark Bittman's book How to Cook Everything. I survived however -- and it was worth it as the squid was a welcome addition and quite delicious. 

Back to normal photos...

Cooking up the onions in the paella pan

After adding the raw shrimp, mussels and squid rings.

Final product!

When I make the dish again (yes, I'm still willing to do it again), I think I would add some additional seasoning to spice things up up a little. The recipe is very basic -- onion, arborio rice, olive oil, fish stock, the seafood and some saffron -- so there's room to jazz things up. 

The recipe we used suggested cooking the onions and coating the rice in the onion/olive oil mixture before adding the stock and seafood and moving the pan to the oven. We didn't get that layer of crispy rice (or socarrat) at the bottom, but I hope that will come with practice.

I definitely liked the use of fish stock. It wasn't too fishy, and I think had we used vegetable or chicken, it may not have had the same effect of working with the other seafood items. I liked the variety of seafood included in the paella, and would continue to use two/three/four seafood options.