Meal 2: To Sear, with Love (Seared Scallops and Blistered Broccolini)
In which our date night meal gets a makeover.
The only person who loves scallops more than me is the dad on Big Mouth. Which is a real shame because I spent the first few episodes thinking “Oh that’s so me. I really identify with this middle-aged Jewish man.” And then he turned out to be pretty much just an abusive prick. Suffice to say I’m conflicted.
When you think of scallops, you think of fancy restaurants. You think of GB&D (golden brown & delicious) crusts on a soft pillow of light, fluffy shellfish. You think excess, honey. You think elegance, darling.
At the beginning of my relationship, I wanted to impress my boyfriend Patrick. Not with personality or good looks or an extensive knowledge of The Simpsons. I wanted to impress him with my cooking. What better way to prove your worth in the kitchen than with scallops? On a blustery October evening last year, I braved rush hour at Mariano’s, picked out a dozen scallops and a bouquet of flowers, and grabbed several bunches of broccolini.
I love the drama of broccolini. Long, tender stalks with just a little bit of the florets to get really crispy. I have no idea what brought me to select broccolini that evening (grocery stores in Chicago are notoriously inconsistent with stocking them), but the resulting meal became a staple in our relationship. Working in batches and adjusting an older recipe from Carla Lalli Music, I made a pretty fantastic plate-licking dinner, if I do say so myself. It’s hard to go wrong with lots of butter and lots of lemons and capers. This was a time when I was still cooking the broccolini in the oven, and throwing on the broiler to get them burnt to a crisp the way Patrick prefers.
It was the best of times, it was the best I could do at the time. And even so, it was our meal. After every vacation home to Michigan, we had scallops and burnt broccolini. When we wanted to make a special date night for ourselves, it was scallops and broccolini. We slowly grew an appreciation for properly sourcing our seafood, preferring independent fishmongers to supermarket thawed fish.
It was a year of discovery. But practice did not make perfect. No matter how many different videos I watched, the finished scallops were totally inconsistent. Sometimes the crust was right, but the fish was overcooked and rubbery. Sometimes the meat was absolutely perfect and delicious, but at the expense of a non-existent crust. They say you’re your own worst critic. But I found my toughest critic in Patrick. With rose-colored memories of our first dates to guide him, Patrick gave the most honest criticism for each and every scallop endeavor. It was only fair.
Choosing the Meal
Sometime in late September, just after I purchased Cook This Book, I bought a box of medjool dates. Then life happened. I went home for my brother’s 30th birthday, I had a crisis of career path, and Spooky Season began in earnest, which really took up most of my energy (the apartment isn’t going to decorate itself, ya know). Every morning I passed by the box of dates, wondering how they got there. I knew I bought them at some point. I knew I bought them for some reason. But I couldn’t for the life of me remember what compelled me to buy the squishy fruit—let alone a huge box of them.
As Patrick and I approached our anniversary, I wanted to make our scallop and broccolini meal. But this time I wanted to really go all out, experiment, foof around, go crazy with it. I scanned through Molly’s book, hoping for a miracle. There it was, page 111, Seared Scallops with Curry Butter, Sweet Corn & Sungolds. Perfect. It was unlike anything I’d ever done with scallops before. Sweet corn and cherry tomatoes with scallops? And curry powder? Everything in my tastebuds told me it would all overpower the delicate taste of the protein. But who was I to judge? My last few tries of scallops were just OK, so I really had nothing to lose.
Out of total curiosity, I scanned down to the Veggies chapter, just to see if Molly Baz had included a dish using our favorite little baby trees. Suddenly, it was all so clear. Page 200, Blistered Broccolini with Charred Dates, Lemon & Sesame. Of course! When Patrick was sick the day I bought the book, I must have seen the recipe and bought a big box of dates in preparation to surprise him with his favorite veggies. But the tonsillitis made it painful for him to swallow anything but plain chicken soup, so crispy greens were out of the question. Here we are, almost a month later, and I’m already halfway done with my shopping list.
Incidentally, did you know that it’s next to impossible to find corn (let alone sweet corn) in a Chicago grocery store in October? Kinda weird when you think about all the off-season produce that they stock year-round! Kinda odd to think how there’s an entire movie about the fact that corn is in every single thing we eat! Did we as a country suddenly run out?! Can’t believe I schlepped to 4 different stores to create one meal!
Making the Meal
Let’s get the broccolini out of the way right now. It was good, it was great even, but it was pretty much the same broccolini I normally make, with the addition of caramelized dates and lemons. I think I wanted to like this dish more than I did, and I’m not sure if that’s the fault of the recipe or my shortcomings as a cook. The dates added a tasty but exceptionally Milk-Duds-stuck-to-your-teeth chewiness that hurt your jaw. The lemons didn’t seem to caramelize so much as get burnt to a crisp on the outside while the interior retained its bitter rind flavor. All of this, I’m sure, is not the recipe’s fault. Perhaps the heat was too high, or I didn’t add a good oil:lemon ratio, or I let them go too long due to a preoccupation with the scallops. Either way, the recipe will have to be made again for a true review, but you can’t go wrong blistering broccolini until the treetops look like a Smokey Bear PSA.
Ahh, the scallops. The pièce de résistance. Much like opening TikTok and seeing that it’s a bones day (this joke will be outdated in 3…2…1…), the food gods smiled down on me when I hopped over to Dirk’s Fish that afternoon. The case of scallops was about half gone, but what remained were all perfectly fresh, creamy-white lumps of sushi-grade goodness. Normally by 2 o’clock, a dozen or so have turned pink from exposure to air. Not today. If Dirk grabbed ten scallops while blindfolded, they would have been winners. He wrapped them up, along with my usual piece of smoked salmon (for morning bagels), and sent me on my way with a complimentary lemon. For once, I wouldn’t need it.
I prepped the marinated salad of tomatoes, shallots, and corn, then began heating the cast-iron skillet. Now, the recipe actually says “medium-high heat,” but Molly mentions at least twice that the key to great scallops is “a really fucking hot pan.” I cranked the stove up to almost as high as she could go, and watched the vegetable oil for wisps of smoke.
In the past, I’ve patted the scallops dry ahead of time and made other dishes while I waited to cook. Following Molly’s instructions, I patted them dry and seasoned them right before I needed them, which definitely helped in the crust department. Rather than tossing the discarded muscle on the side of each scallop, I opted to pop them into my mouth raw, pretending to be Jacques Pépin.
Like the miserable cis male that I am, I read some of the instructions for the scallops and thought, “No, actually that’s incorrect, Molly. That will overcook the scallops and make them rubbery.” Oh, how wrong I was.
What made me nervous was plopping in the unmelted butter and dry curry powder onto the scallops after they’ve been flipped. In my experience, the second side cooks so quickly that there’s not enough time to wait for butter to melt and mix with seasoning. Well, friends, lemme tell you what happens when you have a truly scorching hot pan to throw said butter into. It melts. Like, really fast.
The only problem with this recipe was my lack of pan space. It resulted in one scallop getting a clump of curry powder stuck to the top of it as there was no room for me to really mix the butter and powder together. In the future, I’ll likely prep a tiny saucepan to get the butter and curry mixed together ahead of time for a more even basting.
OK, so we’ve cooked the scallops according to the recipe—convinced that I had overcooked them to car-tire consistency—we’ve added the marinated corn and tomato salad, and we’ve got everything all plated. The moment of truth…was delayed by me eating some broccolini first and loudly proclaiming it to be delicious, for fear of what the scallops would taste like.
And then, it happened. The first bite of scallop.
I have sat on this sentence for several minutes. Drafting and re-drafting ways I can describe to you what it feels like to simply remember these scallops.
If you’ve ever had exceptional sourdough bread, you’ll know that the outside is crisp and firm, with a light, fluffy interior. Now, I may not be able to eat sourdough bread for the rest of my life (unless Dr. Fauci replies to my letters about a Celiac vaccine), but I can certainly experience the same joy sliding my knife through these curry butter scallops. The crust was Michelin-star-restaurant level. The insides—on each and every single one, regardless of pan placement—were buttery soft, maintaining their delicate flavor. Barring the one piece that needed to have the clumped curry powder scraped into the corn salad, this was the single best scallop dish I’ve ever made. In fact, it was the best scallop dish I’ve eaten, period. Every new flavor complimented and enhanced the other.
There was a party in my mouth, and it was, like, the classiest orgy you’ve ever imagined. It was what the Playboy parties pretended to be in the 60s, but with flavor.
Now I know what you can cook for me up north.
💕💕
Reading this has brightened my day just when I needed it