'Cause you never can get enough squid...

Right? I think I could have squid every day and not get bored of it. Fried, with rice, pasta... there are so many ways to prepare this wonderful seafood. One of the famous Spanish ways to make it is "relleno": stuffed. You can basically fill it with anything: meat, shrimps, seafood, veggies... In order to honor my second country ;), I decided to give it a try with a seafood filling. I had some chipirones (smaller version of squid) and started working. A coworker told me to try it with a red pepper sauce, so that's what I did.

Chipirones Rellenos

Ingredients:

6 chipirones
2 palitos de mar (fake crabmeat)
1/2 small red onion
2 mushrooms
1 tbsp of breadcrumbs
1 red pepper
1 pear tomato
1 garlic clove
1/2 cup of water
1/2 cup of white wine
salt and pepper
parsley
oil

This is a pretty small quantity, so I recommend doing more. The stuffed squid actually freezes well before cooking. Therefore, you can make a whole bunch and freeze it.

Dice the tomato, red pepper and garlic clove. In a saucepan, heat some oil and add the veggies. After a few minutes, add the water and wine. Cover and cook until tender.

In the meantime, clean the chipirones. When you remove the "wings" and "legs", keep them aside; they will be used in the filling.

** Super cool trick if filling squid: Flip the squid inside out. When heated, it will close off by itself and you will not need to use toothpicks. Flipping them is super easy. Using your finger, push the end of the tube inside of it and roll it out. Remove from your finger and there you have it. An inside out squid! (no pics but google it if you want)**

Finely chop the wings, legs, crabmeat, red onion and mushroom. In a skillet, heat some oil and add the red onion. Sweat for a minute and add the squid filling, crabmeat and mushrooms.

Cook for a few minutes.

Remove from the pan and let cool.

Add the salt, pepper and breadcrumbs. The breadcrumbs help the filling stick together (trick from my awesome coworker :) )

When the filling has cooled down, fill the squid. Do leave a bit of squid unfilled as they shrink while cooking.

In the same skillet, add some oil and cook the squid. Notice how they are starting to close off.

When you place the squid to cook, using a hand mixer, grind the sauce veggies together. Add some parsley and your sauce is ready. Add it to the pan.

Coat the squid with the sauce and there you have it. My sauce was a bit too thick for my taste but adding some water would have solved the issue.

Buen provecho :)