I'm totally putting the blame on M for this one. Had she not bought, photographed, then not eaten but frozen and some time later made into some sort of not-really appealing rice soup an, apparently, amazing batch of scallops, D would probably not have gone around talking about his awesome way of cooking them for the past few weeks.
But they both did, as a result of which last night's shopping included me standing in the long queue letting person after person go to the checkout first whilst D was having an excited conversation with a newly found friend (read: a random passer by whose wife really really wished she wasn't there, I've been told) in front of the mollusk freezer about which ones are which and what is the best for what.
In the end we did manage to get ourselves to the cashier with a bag of.. well, somethings. My love of seafood is, of course, known to everyone. So we also got a chunk of beef as a side.
Approximate sequence of events after that:
Tetris groceries into fridge/freezer. Get the dry dishes out of the way before something nasty drips onto them, wash the dirty dishes to get those out of the way.
Thaw the scallops on a non-heated pan (so as not to cook them in any way, but a metal pan on metal counter is pretty good at distributing energy), keep the liquid from the animals for making a sauce.
Marinate beef in tonkatsu sauce + pepper + balsamico + cooking wine.
Discover that the even cheaper white wine (about 300 yen instead of the regular under 500 yen) we got to test for cooking doesn't have much taste - a.k.a not good for that intended purpose, but is somewhat drinkeable. Act accordingly.
Unravel the scallops separating the centre, coral, intestines etc side parts. Clean and rinse those properly.
Remember that the idea was to make some oven-baked sweet potato. To save time, after washing and removing the damaged parts, put them into micro 500W 10 min.
Discover that it was waaay too long and the things have gone drydrydry. Should have done 5 min and kept them covered.
Heat up the actual oven, cut all potatoes in half, put in some butter and wine, wrap in aluminium foil, toss into oven for 10 min.
Also peel 2 small cucumbers, slice them with a cheeseslicer, add pepper, salt, sour cream and lemon juice. Mix into fresh salad (that had some sort of Polish name, but hell if I remember it now...)
Meanwhile grill the meat.
And fry the scallops (centres and corals) in a pool of butter. (Not sure how long it took. 5 min on either side perhaps?)
And make the leftover butter with the liquid from the beginning and some additional wine into a too-salty-but-ok-for-dipping sauce.
Serve, take final pictures (oh yea, all of the process has been documented for educational purposes.)
Sit at the plate and be very scared. Because... some sort of ickyness from the sea.. iuuhh.
Gather courage, taste.
And survive.
Not bad, really. The centre parts tasted like that fake-crab-sheet-rolls-in-plastic-tube that mom used to eat. The Coral part, that came with the warning of being very fishy, reminded me of butter-fried salmon.
No scary after-effects either.
Except for the fishy smell everywhere and having to clean everything for about an hour...
Not saying this will become my favourite thing ever, or even that I'd be very willing to make it myself, but at least another thing tried, another adventure and the thing was completely edible. Am now willing to forgive seafood the sin of it's existence a bit more.
Cheers,
Hedi
