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Original Italian name: Insalata di mare
Place of origin: Venezia, Northeast Italy
Recalling a recent trip to Italy in my mind, I decided to cook very easy made Italian version of a famous seafood salad. Once we visited a small lovely town St. Margherita located near Genoa, Liguria in Northwest Italy. Being there I was impressed by a local marinara salad. It was a huge sized plate full of seafood and leaves of salad. Marvelous! It included all sorts of local seafood and fishes. I was really impressed.
It is not surprising that seafood is extremely popular in Italian coastal regions having a broad variety of a freshest local catch. There are abundance of shrimps and crayfishes, different sorts of crabs, shellfishes including mussels, clams and scallops. Then there are all kinds of snails and murex shells, squids (calamari) and octopuses. They are different but one thing is the same -the fact that they are all can be best eaten being totally fresh. Cooking needs to be gentle engaging steaming or light broiling.
Seafood salad from Venezia takes 20-25 minutes to prepare ingredients. Before the salad is served it needs an hour at least to be precooked. It is highly recommended to soak the seafood in the sauce and place it to the fridge in order to achieve better and juicy flavour. We can serve the seafood on the salad leaves but even with no leaves the salad is fine.
Seafood salad
Ingredients (serves 4-6)
800 g seafood (e.g. shrimp, scallop, small squid, baby octopus, mussels, clams)
1 clove of garlic
juice of 1 lemon
3 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
2 tablespoon flat leaf parsley, finely chopped
salt and freshly milled pepper
salad for garnish (spinach or mix salad leaves)
lemon for garnish
Method
Pour the lemon juice over the garlic and leave to infuse for 1 hour. Then remove the garlic.
Prepare the seafood - chop the squid into rings, prepare mussels and clams before cooking. Rinse the seafood and let drain well. Cook the seafood in a little water stirring slowly for about 5-7 minutes until it is very soft. Squid and octopus usually takes the longest time to cook. Discard any mussels and clams which do not open once they have been cooked.
Mix the lemon juice, olive oil, parsley, salt and pepper. Turn the seafood in the sauce until coated, and leave in the fridge for at least 1 hour for the flavours to develop.
In case of using salad leaves for serve, place the seafood on leaves with a little bit sauce. It is recommended to use more sauce servicing seafood as a separate dish.
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