Octopus salad

Cooking octopus during Lent is popular with us Maltese. This recipe is more adventurous than the usual octopus in garlic or octopus stew.

Octopus with parsley pesto

[caption id=”attachment_339" align=”aligncenter” width=”500" caption=”Octopus salad”]

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Serves 4

• 1.5kg octopus
• 1 whole garlic bulb
• rind of 1 lemon
• chili pepper
• 3 parsley stalks
• 4 tblsp olive oil
• 4 large potatoes

for the parsley pesto

• 30gr parsley (without the stalk)
• 2 garlic cloves crushed
• 40gr grated parmesan
• 30gr walnuts
• olive oil
• salt & pepper

Take a large pan, pour in 4 tblsp olive oil, chopped garlic, chili pepper and parsley stalks and add the grated lemon rind. Leave for few minutes and add octopus. Simmer on low heat for around 1 hour until tender. You can check whether its cooked by putting in a fork in its tentacles. When ready clean it from its fatty meat between the tentacles and chop into bite size pieces.

In the meantime, peel and slice the potatoes and cook them in salted boiling water until tender but do not leave them too much otherwise they will crumble. When ready cool them by pouring cold running water over them and put them aside drizzled with some olive oil.

To prepare the pesto just put all ingredients together in a jug and blend well with the blender adding olive oil as necessary.

Serve by placing the sliced boiled potatoes in the centre of the plate, top up with octopus pieces and drizzle with the parsley pesto. You can squeeze some lemon juice according to your liking.

Enjoy!