I’ve been cooking essentially since I was a child but I STILL have kitchen disasters. I can’t seem to avoid it. I tried to cook baby octopus for the first time. My problems were numerous.

1. They were too tough to cut with a knife so I needed to use a pair of scissors to snip them. I highly suspect the scissors are now ruined.
2. The were gross to touch. I should have worn gloves! Very slimy. It felt odd picking one up with my bare hands and snipping away.
3. I cut the pieces too big. I wanted to get it over with! But when I put the octopus in the skillet the pieces started to puff up. I thought protein based foods were supposed to shrink?
4. To try to get some of the toughness out, I squirted lemon juice all over them. Something about the lemon didn’t interact well with what I had in the pan. They smelled.

So in the end I had smelly, rubbery baby octopus. I promptly shut the pasta water off and decided to make scrambled eggs instead.

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