Pan-Seared Squid

I was down at Mt. Pleasant Seafood company and saw some good looking squid and bought it. And, as usual, I was in a quandry over what to do with it since fried calamari is a great and wonderful thing but a pain to make at home (unless you enjoy the odor of fishy, burnt cooking oil liongering in the air for day, which is usually what happens whenever I try to stove-top deep fry anything that came from the sea).

So, I trolled the 'Net and found a promising looking recipe for "Squid with Bacon and Garlic Oil" from Bobby Flay on the Food Network site. Here's my version, pared down a little in volume, and it made for a great tapas-style appetizer--enough to keep at bay The Wife (who oddly thinks eating at 9:00 PM is too late) while I bathed The Seven Year old then cooked a big shrimp-and-scallop feast:

2 slices of bacon, sliced into small bits
2 cloves of garlic, sliced
drizzle of olive oil (about 1 T)
4 squid tubes, rinsed and sliced into rings
salt & pepper
chopped parsley
1/4 of a lemon

Cook the bacon slowly in a pan over medium heat until the fat has rendered out and it's starting to get crispy. Raise the heat to medium-high and add a drizzle of olive oil, then the garlic and squid. Cook, tossing occassionally, for 2 to 3 minutes, until the squid is cooked through. Don't overdo it--overcooked squid turns to rubber.

Remove from the heat, stir in the chopped parsley, and squeeze over the lemon juice.

The lemon juice doesn't appear in Flay's recipe, but when I took the pan of squid off the stove they were almost audibly screaming to be squirted with lemon juice. So I did, and the resulting lemon-and-bacony-garlicky-olive oil combination was so unbelievable I had to sop it all out of the bowl once the squid was all gone.