Monday, July 8, 2013

Xan: It's scallop time!

I came home rather tired from work but mom was thawing scallops on the counter so I could not resist cooking them:

Delicious despite lame cell phone camera.

Because I never cooked scallops before, that's why.  Of course I looked up doneness temperatures on the interwebs and used a meat thermometer, which is how come they came out perfect despite the fact that I never cooked scallops before and have no idea what I'm doing.  I love the 21st century!

This was really easy.  Also I managed to make this using only ingredients I could find in my parents' kitchen.  You should be very impressed, as I am a bad finder and I didn't get any help from mom.  The only thing she told me was that we didn't have any spinach, which wasn't even true.

I chopped up some bacon and rendered out the fat, which I then seared the scallops in.  I deglazed the pan with white wine vinegar and a bit of lemon juice.  Because that was the first vinegar I found, that's why.  Also it is the obvious choice according to xan's cooking heuristics.  I then added some garlic and crispy bacon bits and wilted the spinach and that was it really.

The spinach was really good, even though I don't usually enjoy cooked spinach from my parents' kitchen, but that is probably because they don't cook it properly, i.e. with bacon.

By the way, let me just say that cooking with bacon is not the same as cooking with an unhealthy amount of bacon.  A little bacon can go a long way!

Provocative Claim: It is self-defeating to force feed your children steamed vegetables when you could simultaneously increase their vegetable intake (and hence overall health!) while decreasing your eternal efforts to police their vegetable intake, simply by making vegetables a little less healthy and a lot more delicious by adding some bacon.  It is probably even better to just get some browning going, but surely we can at least say that bacon trumps steam.

(Discuss).