Forget fancy fish restaurants with white tablecloths, complicated sauces and big price tags. All you need is a hot grill -- and an Italian.
I just had the best seafood of my life here yesterday -- cooked on an outside barbecue at a shack with picnic tables and plastic utensils beside a little lake in the woods.
The calamari were as soft as butter -- never tasted calamari that tender, never knew calamari COULD be that tender. The salmon melted in my mouth, a little charred on the outside, just cooked on the inside. The king prawn (king prawn at a shack open only on the weekends?) as succulent as they possibly could be.
How do the Italians do it time after time? How do they know how to make the tastiest, but also the simplest, food in the world, ALL THE TIME? Is it genetic? Is it that they just won't accept it otherwise?
A friend and I went to spend Sunday afternoon at this little lake near my house. It's been as hot as August here recently so we wanted to cool off.
We saw the little shack at the far end of the beach and decided to see if they might have a "panino" -- a sandwich -- something easy we could have for lunch. When we got there, we saw there were no sandwiches, but rather a big smoking grill and a hand-written menu that offered everything "a la brace", or on the barbecue -- sausages, kebabs, lake fish, salmon and a king prawn-calamari combo.
While we waited in line to order, we saw the salmon go by, the lines of the grill visible on the fish steak.
"That looks good," I said to my friend. We ordered a salmon and the seafood combo to share.
Oh. My. God. The two of us could barely speak as we ate. We kept looking at each other in disbelief as we chewed, the only words between us intermittent "mmmmmms."
After we ate, we went to talk to the cook.
"How did you do it?," we asked. "Did you marinate it? Is there some secret ingredient?"
Nope. Nothing at all. Just a hot grill. And knowing to not overcook it.
And then a drizzle of oil and a shake of salt.
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