Friday evenings are a great experimentation time in the kitchen for me. My wife’s usually taking a nap, my daughter is either in her room chatting on line or with her boy friend and my son is gaming on line with friends. Whatever I make for dinner is, well, just for me.
I was thinking about what to make for dinner from the moment I woke up this morning. I narrowed it down to doing “something” with the bay scallops in the freezer and wondered if I could adapt a recipe for pan searing sea scollops to the bays. The recipe was pretty simple: hot oil in a pan, salt & pepper the scallops, then sear on one side for a minute or so, then flip to the other side, throw in some butter and spoon melting butter over the scallops while they finish. No problem.
Since I had less than the recipe called for I figured on halving the oil and butter but attempt to follow it all the same. Because the bay scallops are small pan tossing them would probably work better than trying to flip them all with tongs. Armed with my 12″ All-Clad, 2 tbsp of butter and some veggie oil I was ready to give it a whirl.
For prep, I thawed the scallops and then set them in a paper towel lined cookie sheet to drain and patted off the excess water. After leaving them alone for about 5 mintues I seasoned them with salt and a lemon pepper blend that I got from Penzy’s Spices. Once the pan was smoking hot with vegetable oil I put about 1/2 the batch of scallops in there for about 1.5 minutes and then tossed. In went 1 tbsp of butter, but I quickly realized that 1 tbsp would not be sufficient to baste the scallops in. So I continued to toss and stir as the scallops (and butter) finished browning for another minute or so. After removing the finished batch I re-oiled the pan, added the next batch and continued on as before.
At this point I noticed a nice fond developing on bottom of the skillet. I’m now thinking “pan sauce”. I hauled out my el-cheep-o bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, another tbsp of butter, chopped some fresh parsley (ya I move fast) and waited on the second batch to complete. After evacuating the scallops, I doused the pan with about 2/3rds cup wine and scraped up the bottom. After letting it reduce I swirled in the tbsp of butter to thicken things up. Off heat I added in the parsely and spooned it all (OK I dumped it) over the scallops and sat down to enjoy with my 2009 Simi Sonoma County Sauvignon Blanc.
15 minutes later there was nothing left – well I still had wine in the bottle but the scallops (did I mention I had a veggie-broccoli blend too) were history. Not bad for a Friday night, make-it-up-as-you-go-along dinner.
I just might have to write that down.
