SPICEGASM.COM My travel tales and food hunting

Few of the Tagalog words that I learned when I first arrived in the Philippines was Pancit and pusit. Pancit is easy for me to remember as it goes with another word Canton. I speak Cantonese so the word Pancit Canton easily stick to my mind. The other word Pusit ( squid or calamari ) sounds like Pancit. Sometimes I do get it mixed up and ended up calling the must have Filipino birthdays dish Pusit Canton. My Pinoy friends would  laughed at me and corrected my blunder.

One time when I was in a Chinese restaurant in Malate, I saw this calamari dish on the menu called Calamari with Salt and Pepper. Suddenly I have a feeling that I will never forget the Tagalog word for calamari. I just put the words “Pusit Some More” together as it reminded me of a popular 90’s song by Salt and Pepper “Push It Some More”. I am sure those of you who are actively involved in the disco scenes in the 90’s are hearing the tune in your head now.

Few weeks ago, I made a dish named Begedel and it gave me an idea to use part of the concept for my stuffed calamari dish. So here are the steps on how I made my calamari dish and I shall name it “Pusit Some More”.

INGREDIENTS :-

• half kilo of calamari/squid – clean it throughout and remove the head and set aside
• one big potato – boil till soft
• one small carrot – chopped fine
• one onion – chopped fine
• 6 spoonful of multi purpose flour
• one big spoonful curry power
• one teaspoon turmeric powder
• salt and pepper
• 3/4 cup water
• one egg
• 2 sticks ( the type used for BBQ skewing )

INSTRUCTIONS :-

• Making the filling
• Boil the potato till soft and mash it
• add in chopped carrots and onion
• add salt and pepper and mixed will
• stuff the mixed potato filling into the body of the calamari. Make sure you stuff it real good by – Push It Some More ( I can’t resist…lol )
• one is properly stuffed, put the squid head on top and seal it with the stick ( refer to picture above ) and set aside
• Making the batter
• put flour in a bowl
• break an egg
• add in curry powder, turmeric and water and mixed well – make sure it is evenly mixed and thick
• Heat up oil for deep frying and soaked stuffed calamari in batter mixed
• Fry till crunchy and golden brown

The Filling – mash potato with carrot and onion

Batter mixed with turmeric and curry powder

Stuffed Calamari ready to be soaked into batter and fry

My Pusit Some More

The hardest part for me when making this dish was stuffing the filling into the slippery calamari. I have to admit that this is my first attempt in making this dish. The result was pretty good but I wouldn’t rate this as my best dish on first attempt. My batter wasn’t thick enough and it did not really coat the calamari as much as I would like it to. Maybe I should have dried the calamari by covering it with very thin layer of flour to make it dry. I am sure my second attempt would be better and I can get 3 different kind of texture from this dish. Crunchiness from the batter, spongy and rubbery from the calamari and soft and easy from the mash potato. The curry powder will give a very nice taste to this Pusit Some More dish.