Never before in the last year of doing this blog have I anticipated something so much, and was let down as much. But I'm getting ahead of myself. As I am The Diet, I wanted to grill up some shellfish. The Bride expressed interest in either shrimp or scallops, and I found a recipe that I had been holding on to for a while, the Parmesan Breaded Scallops With Lemon Garnish on page 314.
My word, scallops have gone up in price! Eight scallops ran me $26.00, which really isn't worth it. For a dinner party, at two scallops a person for a small course, this would be over fifty dollars. That's a bit steep. I hope they come down over the summer.
Meanwhile, the first step for dinner tonight was to set up a breading station. In order to avoid cross-contamination, everything would always move the same direction. Here's my station:
On the far left is the paper towel that was used to dry the scallop.
Following that was the bowl to lightly coat the scallop in olive oil.
From there the scallop went into the breading bowl.
And from there they went to the tray to allow the breading to set.
This really only took a minute or two to accomplish, and they were now ready to go into the fridge!
With the scallops in the fridge, the last necessary step was to pull together the garnish, and then I could move on to cooking the side dish.
The side dish I picked out was actually another non-grill side, but it looked fairly Mediterranean, which is what I was after. Here we have the ingredients (minus the parsley that I forgot to put in the picture) for the Raisin-Pine Nut Couscous.
This is a fairly simple recipe. Begin this dish by boiling the "wet" ingredients.
From there, you can add the couscous and let it absorb the liquid. Add in the nuts and mint, and you are set! The scallops, in the meantime, looked quite good (the bore a striking resemblance to the picture in the cookbook, so I was extra excited).
A quick plating later, I brought The Bride her dish and we sat down to watch The Tudors and enjoy our meal...
...only we didn't. As I gave away in the opening paragraph, neither of us liked this recipe. I really can't figure out why, either. It's a rather simple recipe for scallops, using classic ingredients. My techniques were solid, and the scallops were perfectly cooked. It just didn't taste good. I even enjoy a good contrast in texture, which this had, but even that wasn't all too pleasant. The couscous had some redeeming qualities, and could become part of something a little more exotic, but otherwise was lost in the meal. Weber has done so well with the other scallop recipes, and this LOOKS so tasty, but was classified as a "swing and miss" by both of us. Oh well.
In other news, someone was the lucky 1,000th viewer! Who was it?
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