I think that I mentioned before that Lyn gets to pick a meal a week that is off her strict diet. She picked Pan Seared Seas Scallops. I had never made sea scallops had used bay in stir fry, I could tell you about someone making Szechuan scallops for their as it turned out to be in-laws and forgetting if they had put in the pepper and added again, boy was that spicy, but I won’t. Anyway….

Ingredients

• ½ pound sea scallops (about 4)
• 1 tablespoons Oil
• 2 tablespoons melted butter
• Salt and pepper
• Balsamic vinegar – we have 18 year old, so sweet so good

How:

Turn on exhaust fan

Heat pan on high until hot

Tipping away from you add oil

Add scallops cook for about 2 minutes

Add butter and flip the scallops cook for about 2 minutes

Remove from pan and serve on bed of roasted veggies we had eggplant, zucchini, red pepper and tomatoes drizzle with some balsamic vinegar.

Ingredients

Flip and add butter for another 2 minutes

Plate up

Scallops

sea-scallop

Bay scallops and sea scallops are closely related members of the same family of shellfish. Both make extremely good eating. Gourmets particularly prize bay scallops, which are much smaller than sea scallops, for their tenderness and the sweetness of their flavor. Because they are smaller, bay scallops require considerably shorter cooking times and benefit from gentler methods, while sea scallops stand up to fiercer heat. In both cases, overcooking renders them tough. Bay scallops are in short supply because of the degradation of their habitat by pollution. Vendors offer both types packed either “wet” or “dry.” Choose dry ones if possible—they are in their natural state. Wet scallops have been soaked in phosphates, which affects their flavor and causes them to absorb water which they give up in cooking.

 

bay-scallops

Scallops are two-shelled marine mollusks that actively swim through the water, propelling themselves by opening and shutting their shells. The large round white muscle that they use to do this—sweet-flavored and naturally very low in fat—is the part that we eat (in Europe the delicately flavored orange roe is also highly prized). Unlike clams or mussels, scallops are unable to shut their shells completely, and cannot survive out of water. Harvesters therefore normally shuck them as soon as they are caught and place the meat on ice.