Piggy Goes To Market

My buddy Greg Brooks was kind enough to haul a 700 lb. birthday prezzie for my babycakes across town to our house a couple weeks ago.  So to thank him, I prepared a seafood extravaganza for him and his pretty wiffy Suzee.

Can you believe this thing is 700 lbs?  I barely believe it.  In fact, I was told by the hardware store cockbags:

I don’t think you really understand how heavy this thing is.

My head is still spinning from the raw incomprehensibility of the weight of this tool cabinet.

I borrowed a recipe from chowhound.com: Seared Scallops with Fava Bean saute.  Sounds like it’ll do, right?  The recipe creator was Amy Wisniewski, who consistently has solid recipes, and this one did not disappoint.  I absolutely LOVE scallops and was eager to prepare fava beans for the first time.  I bought 4 lbs of bean pods for 4 people, which sounds like a lot, but it turns out they’re mostly packaging.  The pods, when split open, are super squishy and dry, like a fuzzy blanket or really thick hairy mold.   It was a long process to open the pods, remove, then blanch the beans, remove the skin of the beans, then separate the 2 pretty bright green halves which are actually eaten.  It was worth it in the end, but favas are not likely to be a regular menu item.

Favas with sweet peas, shallots and bacon, nom.

Pan-fried HOT in bacon fat

To start the evening, we had salmon sushi and unagi, from Central Market.  They sell frozen vacuum-packed-at-the-source sushi grade fish.  I was a little nervous, but it ended up being delicious.  It’s exciting to have a home sushi option that is cheap and easy and yum.  The unagi is pre-cooked and comes with sauce , so you just pop it in the oven for 15 min and it’s ready to be cut and plopped onto some sushi rice.

This did not suck.

Nom, nom.

EDIT:

Here are a some keys to cooking scallops: