Scallops, Jelly, and Pickling

Coffee and morning light,  7am, create contemplative time at 5 Woodside.  The house is quiet (new tenants moved in across the hall yesterday), the garden is sharply outlined in low sunshine and cool air.  I’ve made a cup of strong coffee and am gathering notes for the day.  A pitch upcoming on Isle of Man, business plans to collect from the printer, clinical trials getting underway in Southampton, Cambridge, Groeningen, Hungary…

I deserve a reward when this is done.  Dinner…

I selected a recipe from BBC Food: “Scallops with pickled vegetables, mango jelly, lime and chive sauce.   Prep time: Over two hours”.

Real MasterChef stuff.  Cool: I’m in.

To be fair, I didn’t start until work was done.  Midday, I made a quick run to the printers and post office, then stopped at Waitrose for scallops, white- and rice- wine vinegar, and a parsnip.  Otherwise, it was well past six before I settled in for some serious kitchen work.

The Mango Jelly was kind of fun, peeling the mango, finding the outlines of the seed at the center, carving around it: all new.  I didn’t have a puree machine, nor xanthan gum, so I improvised by reducing the fruit with a bit of white wine, then added a sheet of gelatin and refrigerated.  The result wasn’t quite jelly, but it was solid and tasted intensely mango.

The sauce seemed kind of pointless; scallions, wine, reduce, water, reduce, a ton of butter, reduce, strain: yielding flavored butter.  Nonetheless, it had a good depth.

When I think of pickling, I think of Korean Kimchi, burying cabbage in a pot of vinegar and spices in the back yard and letting it ferment for months.  I’ve seen the TV cooks whip up pickled sides in a hour though, so I  gave it a run.  'Warm the vinegar and sugar, add vegetables, let it sit for two hours.  Honestly, the flavor is (similar to) pickle, but not the texture.  Warming it, then cooling, improved things a bit, but it still tasted like faux-conserver dans le vinaigre to me,  tart taste painted over veg. 

The scallops turned out dead easy: trim off the (orange) roe, dredge in oil, herbs, and spices, then sear for a minute a side.  They seemed a bit underdone to me, but had a nice soft texture.

The recipe advises to arrange the elements in a sunburst, dress with coriander and chive, and serve.  The result looked more like bomb-burst than sun-burst, but it tasted great (at 10 pm…)