virgin attempt at cooking seafood paella

As agreed with the Master last weekend on the laksa day, we gathered at the MCP and HAH residence again for another lesson on cooking - this time it was seafood paella. We engaged two kitchen hands in the form of Cat and Van for this round.

Some of the ingredients used as shown in the below pic are chicken stock, arborio rice, seafood, canned anchovies, chilli, dill, chorizo sausages, lime and fennel.



This huge bowl of seafood contains king prawns, small prawns, scallops, squid and fish. We also got mussels and crabs which are not in this bowl below.



A scene of the kitchen staff hard at work creating the perfect paella cooked with love and a lot of laughter. Fortunately we have a large enough island to lay out all the ingredients and still provided sufficient work space for all four of us to do the cleaning/cutting/chopping/marinating/frying/stirring.



We had to let the one and only man have the honour of cutting up the crabs; I can never bring myself to do it.



Nor can I clean out the squids, so again the only guy got to take on this sacred task. I find it extremely disgusting! Especially the part where you have to dig really deep inside to extract the beak or something... Eeeeeks....



Everyone got to do a bit of cutting and chopping including the Master as there was just too much stuff to be chopped up.



Cat spent the most part of an hour trimming the whiskers off the king prawns to make eating them easier and to massage butter onto each and every prawn. She was the main contributor towards the marinating of a dozen prawns for the garlic prawns dish to complement the paella.



Van was the garlic IC and the pot IC. I hope those tasks were not too daunting for her seeing how she rarely steps into the kitchen.



And for me... I had to juggle cooking the paella in two separate locations - a wok and a deep pot because we didn't have a big enough pan to fit all in - and stir fry the garlic prawns in a third pan.



Here's a shot of the paella in the cooking.



And a shot of the sizzling prawns in the pan.



I had to tiptoe most of the time to reach the bottom of the high pot. I'm sure my arms and calves got more muscular from stirring the wok/pot/pan-fuls of food on tiptoe for about an hour.



Approximately 2 hours after we started the preparations, we were ready for dinner. Again I had the honour of serving five huge plates of yummy paella and a plate of garlic prawns.



Cheers to the chefs and kitchen hands!



And finally a group shot including the photographer who was kept busy the entire night documenting the paella experience before we dug in. Itadakimasu!