Help! There’s a pineapple in my meal

I’ve been putting off writing about this for a few weeks now because I’m a bit embarrassed about what I’ve done. And that’s probably why I’ve been away from Weekend Herb Blogging for a while. But I’ve made the brave decision to join-in this weekend with WHB hosted by Nandita at Saffron Trail.
It all started when a report arrived from Brisbane, Queensland, of the worrying trend of pineapple appearing in main courses in restaurants. I was happy to sneer and join in disparaging this habit.
I was even able to add my own tale of a wasted $45 by ordering at the Gourmet Traveller Regional Restaurant of the Year, Absinthe in Surfers Paradise, a dish involving pineapple and foie gras.
Yes, you heard right. Now, I usually wouldn’t order foie gras unless it was the fresh stuff. In Australia, unless you have some secret supplier in the country we have to put up with the tinned or the pasteurized varieties. These are nowhere near as good to eat but also many times more expensive than the fresh stuff costs in France or England.
So there I was trying to enjoy two wasted ingredients. I’d have been happy eating the pineapple alone and feeding the foie gras to my neighbour’s cat and donating my $45 to the local casino.
The problem is you can keep all of the pineapple out of mains some of the time. And you can keep some of the pineapple out all the time. But you can’t keep all of the pineapple out all of the time.
And this perhaps explains how I returned home with a pineapple and a metre or so of octopus in the same bag and thought I could somehow combine both on one plate. But then I had a recipe from Martin Boetz, the chef at the Asian inspired Longrain in Sydney (and now Melbourne).

Grilled octopus with pineapple mint & sweet chilli
Salad ingredients
50ml thick soy sauce
200g octopus
100g pineapple sliced into thin strips
1/2 cup coriander leaves
This should be regular mint but I used 1/2 cup of leftover Vietnamese mint
1 red chilli.
1 spring onion
Dressing ingredients
100ml lime juice
1/2 teaspoon chilli powder
2 tablespoons shrimp floss (Made, I think, by pounding dried shrimps until they become, um, floss)
2 tablespoons sweet chilli sauce (Blend 2 parts chillis, 2 parts castor sugar and one part each of water and white vinegar. Add salt to taste)
2 chillis (officially birdseye)
Dunk the octopus in the thick soy sauce and grill until golden. Mix the dressing. Mix the dressing wit the salad ingredients and then add the octopus.
Top with five year old crisp fried eschallots that make you wish you’d never bought that big bag of the stuff.

Eat. Drink beer because the chillis are hot.