Dried Cuttlefish - Grilled

A number of months ago when I went to Chinatown in Los Angeles with Andrew and Lauren, I picked up a package of dried cuttlefish.

It sort of look like a cross between a squid and an octopus. Whereas I've seen squid and octopus for sale commercially and on restaurant menus, I've never seen cuttlefish. I did see Andrew Zimmern eat some fresh caught cuttlefish on Bizarre Foods. Without looking up how to eat it or even reading about it, I put it in water and let it re-hydrate all day and over night.

Then I put on some olive oil

and cooked it on the outdoor gas grill.

I was cooking a bunch of other items and may have had the grill too hot. It shriveled pretty quickly. What I was most surprised to see was the canoe-shaped cuttlebone pop out of one of the cuttlefish. What surprised me even more was the realization that the cuttlebone was the cuttlebone used in bird cages

to allow birds to obtain calcium (I always thought it was for the bird to sharpen its beak - I always learn something from Wikipedia). Our cockatiel from a number of years ago had a cuttlebone. I'd never associatated it with the cuttlefish. I cut the cuttlefish up into small pieces for a family get-together with my sister and her family. They all gamely tried it. It was not very appetizing. It was very rubbery and did not have a lot of taste. I can't think of why I would want to cook it again, except for the fact that it looks weird. I would like to try fresh cuttlefish sometime and expect that it would taste very much like octopus and squid.