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May was ‘Grandparents Day’ at Malcolm’s school and my parents popped in for a visit. Each grandparent talked about what school was like for them and described some of their strongest memories. For my mum, it was being afraid to speak in front of the class… she’s still nervous doing it. And for my dad, it was being in a parochial school classroom in NYC with eighty kids!
another nice recipe, this one courtesy of SimplyRecipes: Sea scallops with Asparagus Sauce.
The asparagus sauce is easy and delicious, it is just asparagus, butter and salt. Susan amended the recipe to include some fresh-made fettuccine noodles, but aside from that it is as below. We rounded it off with a nice, summery Portuguese vinho verde. Three scallops per person is plenty BTW, they are very rich.
Sea Scallops with Asparagus Sauce Recipe
Plan on 3 sea scallops per person for a light dinner or appetizer, 5 scallops for a full main course. Many sea scallops come with a tough flap of meat attached to them. Just pull it off and either discard or use in a seafood stock. The asparagus sauce is a great way to use the spears of asparagus in case you’ve chopped off the tips for use in another recipe. You’re just puréeing them here, so you’ll never see the tips.
Ingredients
- 6 sea scallops*
- Salt
- 1 pound asparagus
- 1/2 cup warm chicken broth (if cooking gluten-free use gluten-free stock)
- 2-3 Tbsp butter
- 2 Tbsp canola or grapeseed oil or other high smoke-point oil
Sea scallops are the big scallops, about 1 1/2-inches wide, as opposed to bay scallops which are small, about 1/2-inch wide. Look for “dry pack” scallops, as they are not treated with chemicals to keep them fresh; the chemicals are not overly harmful, but they change the texture of the scallop and make them harder to sear properly.
Method
1 Salt the scallops well and set aside at room temperature while you make the asparagus sauce.
2 Steam the asparagus for the sauce. Use a potato peeler to shave the outer layer off the asparagus spears, up to about three-quarters of the way up the spear. This part is more fibrous and will not break down as well in the blender. Chop into 2-inch pieces. Boil the asparagus in a pot of salted water for 5-8 minutes. This is longer than you’d normally cook asparagus, but you want the spears to blend well later.
3 Remove the asparagus from the pot. If you want to retain that vibrant green color, shock them in an ice bath. Put them in a food processor or blender. Add half the chicken stock and purée until smooth. (If you want an even smoother texture you can push the purée through a fine mesh sieve or a food mill.) Pour the sauce into a small pot and add the butter. Heat over very low heat until the butter melts, but do not let it boil, or even simmer. The sauce should be warm, not hot. If the sauce is too thick you can add more chicken stock. Add salt to taste.
4 Pat the scallops dry with a paper towel. Heat a sauté pan on high heat. Add a high smoke point oil like canola or grapeseed oil, and let it heat up for 2 minutes. The pan should be very hot. If it starts to smoke, move the pan off the heat. Lay in the scallops in the pan, well separated from each other. You might need to sear in batches.
If your scallops are thicker than 1 inch, turn the heat down to medium-high. Most sea scallops are about an inch. Let them sear without moving for at least 3-4 minutes. Keep an eye on them. You will see a crust beginning to form on the outside edge of the scallop, and the meat will begin to whiten upward. A good time to check the scallop is when you see a golden brown ring at the edge of the scallop. Try picking it up with tongs, and if it comes cleanly, check it – you should see a deep golden sear. If not, let it back down and keep searing.
5 When the scallops are well seared on one side, turn them over and sear on high heat for 1 minute (give or take). Then turn off the heat. The residual heat will continue to cook the scallops for a few minutes. Let the scallops cook for at least another minute, or more if you like your scallops well-done.
To serve pour a little sauce in the middle of the plate, top with the scallops, the more browned side up.
Serve at once. Garnish with a little chopped parsley if you want, and maybe with a wedge of lemon.
our friend KC came over for a visit on Saturday and as it was a lovely summery day we made fish tacos. It is the best fish taco recipe I’ve tried so far. We used halibut cheeks as they're fresh now rather than mahi mahi or other fish. Here it is if you want to try it…
Recipe: Fish Tacos
http://www.bigoven.com/161760-Fish-Tacos-recipe.htmlGreat late-summer meal... enjoy it on your deck or patio with Habanero Salsa and a cold beer.
Ingredients:
1 pound white flaky fish, such as mahi mahi
1/4 cup Canola oil
1 lime, juiced
1 tablespoon ancho chili powder
1 jalapeno pepper, coarsely chopped
1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro leaves
8 Flour tortillas
-- GARNISH --
Shredded white cabbage
Hot sauce
Crema or sour cream
Thinly sliced red onion
Thinly sliced green onion
Chopped cilantro leaves
Habanero Salsa (see separate recipe)Preparation:
Preheat grill to medium-high heat. Place fish in a medium-size dish. Whisk together the oil, lime juice, ancho, jalapeno and cilantro, and pour over the fish. Let marinate for 15 to 20 minutes.Remove the fish from the marinade and place onto a hot grill, flesh side down. Grill the fish for 4 minutes on the first side, then flip for 30 seconds and remove. Let rest for 5 minutes, then flake the fish with a fork.
Place the tortillas on the grill and grill for 20 seconds. Divide the fish among the tortillas and garnish with any or all of the garnishes.
We had a basketball hoop in our backyard when I was growing up and spent untold hours out there playing ball. It was the nexus of our block. In fact, I have a memory of spotting the ball for my brother Matt @ the foul line and I seem to recall him sinking 100 in a row. It could be a false memory, but it was certainly quite a few, and he definitely has the hand-eye coordination to do it.
*Anyway*, we thought Malcolm would love a place to shoot hoops too, so we put up a hoop (and a fence panel to keep the ball from bonking the neighbor’s car) in back. My neighbor Doug had a rusty old, super heavy-duty steel backboard from a city park which we sanded down and repainted, and we sunk a 6x6” cedar post for the welded mount on the backboard and added a bamboo fence panel to match the rest of the yard.
The backboard weighs a ton so we put a sheet of plywood across my neighbor’s pickup bed as a scaffold and bolted the backboard onto the pole. Luckily the holes we drilled lined up: It’s positioned at 8’ 3” now while he’s small and there are holes to move the backboard to 10’/regulation height in a few years once he’s older.
Sure enough, Malcolm loves it and plays out there nearly every day after school, and the neighbor kids are using it too which is great.
My dad did most of the work on this.. thanks dad!
late as usual: Happy Mother’s Day and Birthday to my mum!
terrible son that I am, I didn’t post something nice about my mum (aka mumsie) on her birthday (May 4th) nor Mother’s Day, so here it is now. Happy 74th birthday mum! Here is a non-sequitur of a picture of her– newly-arrived in the States -- with gran and bear who appears to be flipping off the cameraman.
The birthday itself was kind of an auspicious day as we day-tripped to my parents’ new place up on Whidbey – in Coupeville. The home is a rather humble if well-kept double wide trailer, but the location (close to Ebey’s Landing, and walking distance to the Keystone Ferry) is beautiful: It reminds me of the English countryside with small lanes and hedgerows alongside the farm fields, and there’s a view (on a clear day) across Admiralty Inlet to Port Townsend and the Olympic Mountains.
The lot features lots of mature flowers and plants, and a neighbor-cat who immediately adopted them; he belongs to their 89 year-old neighbor Lil who still mows her 2+ acres herself each week…
I also liked the ‘Sonics’ birdhouse that the (deceased) guy who used to live here made… go Sonics!
Anyhow… nice place. I trundled the m&p back off to Canada this morning where they’ll be for the next four months or so while they prepare their place up there for sale. They’ll be Washingtonians later this year, Malcolm can’t wait!
one of the most addictive apps I’ve found for the iPhone is Chirp! (USA and Europe versions available) which helps you identify birds based on song or appearance.
Your location is used to list birds by name or common-ness. Now when I hear an unusual bird call or song when I’m working, I’ll pop open Chirp and try to identify the bird.
In my neighborhood, besides the ubiquitous robins and crows, flickers are very common, and there are also a few sparrow varieties. Small hawks also frequent the area although I don’t see them as often (my parents saw one grab a field mouse the other day).
As the iPhone is really more pocket computer than an actual phone, this is an app that really shows the power of the platform. It’s great to be able to pull out the phone from your pocket and identify birds by appearance or song while out walking in the woods or the mountains. It is $2.99 in the App Store, and the lite version is free to try.
