Fish food

Spent an hour at the markets this morning blowing money on useless frippery like fruit, vegetables and bread. And a bit of bacon for breakfast, and a corn fed chook. All the stuff that you don't really need to bother with each week if you live on takeaway.

I don't often visit the seafood counters at the markets because they look like mayhem. They really seem like a good way to get an elbow in the guts or a few squashed toes. However, I have been eyeing off the scallops for a while, and last night, I finally got to the scallops section of my Stephanie Alexander cook book. Her cook book bible is about 5 inches thick, and it's organised alphabetically, so scallops are about 3 months reading from the front.

So I bought a kilo of scallops. I thought I was getting scallops in the half shell, but it turned out that I was getting fresh out of the ocean, uncleaned, unopened scallops. Good thing Stephanie explained how to clean the little buggers, as I had never thought of it before. I've cleaned plenty of mussels, and bashed the odd fresh abalone, and I've watched oysters being shucked in front of me, but I have never seen a fresh scallop.

Here's the thing - when you open them up, the scallop is attached to both halves of the shell with a membrane that looks like two jellyfish - a topside jellyfish and an underneath jellyfish. They peel off the shell easily enough, but cleaning the actual membrane from the scallop is tricky work. I spent a lot of time with the tap running and me ripping membranes off under the running water. After that, it was time to cut off the guts and the poo sack, which is a nasty looking black sack (not to be confused with the roe). That took plenty of time as well.

After cleaning, I had a huge bag of junk (shell, guts and membranes) and a small bread plate covered in maybe two dozen scallops. Given that they only cost $6 a kilo, I am not complaining. All I did was sprinkle on a bit of olive oil, squeeze on a touch of lime juice and then bunged them in the fridge whilst I got on with peeling the prawns.

The scallops went on the BBQ for dinner. I used one of those plastic cooking mat things, which was a waste of time. I should have put my heavy cast iron frying pan on the BBQ and done them in that (the only reason for doing them on the BBQ was to avoid stinking the house out). I did them in a pile of butter, added some fresh thyme and finished them off with a bit of white wine and lime juice. I could have done without the lime juice. The best scallops were the ones that I pushed off the plastic mat and browned a bit on the hot BBQ plate. They don't need long to cook, but I prefer them a little bit brown around the edges, rather than totally squishy. Each to their own.

Next time, I am going to look out for cleaned buggers. Sod this removing guts business.

The prawns were also a right bastard. I bought el cheapo green prawns for about $12 a kilo. They seemed like a steal, until I went to shell them. Most of them had paper thin shells. I presume they were farmed up in Vietnam or somewhere like that, and they didn't feed them enough stuff to develop a proper shell. I hate peeling prawns with crap shells. I want something crunchy that cracks off properly. Again, next time I am going to look for trawler caught prawns from somewhere like Darwin.

They cooked up ok on the BBQ, but they were not great.

So much for the fish food. I think I would have prefered a lamb chop.