Scallops with Sautéed Spinach: Simply Impressive

Okay, let’s all just admit it. One of the big pleasures of cooking is serving a dish that is so delicious, beautiful, sophisticated or [D] all of the above that your guests are blown away. And when said dish is also quick and brainlessly easy to make, you’ve got a real keeper.

Dishes with scallops tend to fall squarely into this camp on all counts. Both the larger sea scallops and their smaller brethren bay scallops have a delicate, slightly sweet and decidedly unfishy taste. And like mushrooms and tofu, they readily take on flavors of herbs, sauces and other seasonings.

Visually, their plump, drumlike shapes—think marshmallows [sea scallops] or miniature marshmallows [bay scallops]—lend themselves to an array of beautiful presentations.

And in terms of simplicity, it just doesn’t get much easier than scallops. In fact, the hardest part of cooking them may be trying to rinse away any tiny particles of sand that can get lodged in the scallops while they’re inside their shells [yes, they are shellfish, so check with guests for any shellfish allergies before adding them to your menu].

I rinse them under cold running water while gently brushing a finger over all surfaces, feeling for grains of sand. It’s a mostly successful method, but occasionally you may bite into a teeny grain that escaped your attention. Big deal. It’s sand, unlike the euphemistically named “vein” in shrimp [which, as we all know, is the shrimp’s, well, guts]. I did look online to see if there was any secret to washing scallops that I didn’t know about. Pretty much everyone just said, “wash scallops to remove grit.” One person did opine that if you’re getting grit on your scallops, you should change sources for buying them—but with so many others telling you to rinse the grit away, one can only wonder at this person’s rarified fishmonger sources. If anyone has a secret tip, I’d love to hear it.

Scallops aren’t just easy to prepare—they’re quick. About the only way you can really screw them up is to overcook them, in which case they’ll come out tough and chewy. So you’re forced to cook quickly [we’re talking minutes here] and not belabor things.

Here’s a quick, impressive recipe that’s actually two great dishes. You can make them separately, but they’re especially wonderful together.

A Little Something on the Side: The Thanksgiving Edition

Today I introduce a new recurring feature: A Little Something on the Side. It’s all about the dishes that play the supporting role to the star of the plate—and on occasion, steal the scene.

First, though, a word about turkey, this being the day before Thanksgiving. No, I’m not going to tell you how to roast one—a quick “roast turkey” search on Epicurious.com brought up 145 recipes, which should more than cover it for you. But I am going to weigh in on stuffing the bird versus not. We don’t. We find the bird roasts faster and more evenly inside and out if you don’t stuff it, so it stays moister. The New York Times’ Mark Bittman, in discussing this very issue in last week’s Times food section, said, “too often stuffing absorbs too much of the cooking juices and comes out a soggy, unappealing mess.” Well, if the stuffing is absorbing all those cooking juices, guess what’s giving it up.

All that said, if you already have your family traditions, DON’T MESS WITH THEM, even if they include a stuffed bird. Thanksgiving is all about tradition—mess it up and your family will be mad at you, and then you’ll hate me. So if you want to liven up your otherwise beloved traditional dinner, just introduce an interesting new side or two. Here’s one we do at our house, instead of stuffing.

To tell you about it, I’m going to honor another of our Thanksgiving traditions: I get out of the kitchen and turn it over to my wife Marion. Oh, I’ll make some mashed potatoes and maybe a salad, but otherwise it’s her show. So for today, I’m turning Blue Kitchen over to her. Thanks, sweetie.

Blue Kitchen: Playing with your food.

Sometimes a cookbook can greatly influence how you cook, even if you never make a single recipe from it. We had a pasta cookbook around the house for years and finally got rid of it in one of our periodic purges when we realized we never used it. Ever. But the author said something in the introduction that completely changed the way I thought about pasta, so it wasn’t money wasted, as far as I was concerned.

His family lived in Italy for a year when he was a boy. Their housekeeper made pasta at least once a day, every day, for that year. In that time, she never made what many of us think of as the classic Italian pasta with red sauce, not once. And she never repeated herself.

When I got over being stunned and amazed by this feat—and it wasn’t a blinding flash of inspiration, but rather a long process of seeing various recipes in various sources, perusing menus in Italian restaurants and, finally, just facing ingredients on hand in my own kitchen—I realized that pasta can be like the perfect basic jazz melody that invites countless amazing improvisations.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good red sauce. It’s just that there are so many other more interesting things to be done with pasta. There are various cream sauces, for instance, and dishes that involve baking the pasta. I’ll save those for another day. Today I’m going to cover a breathtakingly simple technique that will give you all the room in the world to improvise and create your own wonderful meal.

Blue Kitchen: The mysterious… Pot Roast?

It’s funny the things that stick in your brain. I routinely forget to pick up the dry cleaning or that we’re out of cottage cheese or that I was supposed to get the oil changed. But I still remember the day we talked about food in my grade school French class with Mademoiselle [okay, I forget her name too---something French, since she really was from France].

She, being from France and probably wondering exactly how she’d ended up teaching a bunch of squirmy American eleven-year-olds in St. Louis, Missouri, began to wax nostalgic about French food. We, being squirmy American eleven-year-olds from St. Louis, Missouri, were horrified. Sauces were involved. Shallots. Innards. Finally, one of the girls in the class cracked, saying something insightful, like, “Ewwwww.”

Mlle. [Je-ne-sais-quoi] rolled her eyes and said, “Ah, yes. For Americans, everything must taste like fried chicken.”

Despite the fact that, unlike all my other teachers, she was actually young and pretty and spoke with that wonderful accent, I was offended. What the hell was wrong with fried chicken? Being eleven, hell had entered my vocabulary, albeit under my breath unless I was around trusted fellow hell sayers like Carl Halford and Mike Prokopf.

Besides, didn’t we Americans have pizza? Okay, I had never tried it, but my brother Mike had eaten it at Little Charlie’s house and pronounced it good. And didn’t we have chop suey? This ersatz Chinese delicacy hadn’t yet been widely outed as an American invention, so it counted. Okay, I hadn’t personally tried that either—Mike and I always ordered hamburgers when our parents forced us to go to some sketchy Chinese dive downtown.

But that was then, this is now.

Blue Kitchen: The kitchen is open.

Welcome to Blue Kitchen, the place for all things food and cooking and some things Chicago. Blue Kitchen is my way to indulge multiple passions—cooking, eating, exploring the city, photography [all photos on the site are mine, unless otherwise noted] and writing. Oh, and music—be sure to check out what’s on the kitchen boombox. It’s also a place for seemingly random stories—about a three-legged beagle who only spoke French, for instance—that somehow always circle back to the kitchen.

Look for new posts every Wednesday, newspapers’ traditional food section day.

Chicken and Wine: An evolutionary tale.

 

No, the title doesn’t refer to the theory—still hotly debated, apparently—that birds evolved from dinosaurs [although the thought of dining on a dinosaur's distant relative is pretty cool, you have to admit]. It has to do with how cooking and recipes naturally evolve over time.

This recipe is one I’ve made pretty much since I began cooking. And just as my cooking has, it’s evolved and become a little more refined, a little more complex over time. So it’s fitting it should be the very first recipe on Blue Kitchen.

Over the years, I’ve experimented with cooking times, tweaked the herbs and messed with the sauce in various efforts to freshen up a meal that family and friends already loved. There’ve been a couple notable failures: Adding chicken stock to the sauce for more flavor—the flavor it added was chicken soup. And adding a little dried thyme—everyone agreed the “thymeless classic” was better.

There has also been a notable success in the last couple of years: Adding Herbes de Provence, a wonderfully aromatic blend of [typically dried] herbs and lavender flowers used in the cuisine of the Provence region of the south of France. The mix of herbs varies—the blend I use contains rosemary, French thyme, tarragon, basil, savory, cracked fennel, lavender and marjoram. This simple addition gives the dish a complexity the bay leaves alone couldn’t deliver.

Chicken & Wine, as I prepare it, is quite distinct from the classic French coq au vin. It uses white wine instead of red, for one thing, and the cooking time is much shorter; coq au vin pretty much demands to be cooked a day ahead and allowed to swap flavors in the fridge overnight. This dish is best when served immediately after cooking.

There’s a comfort food aspect to this dish that makes it a great family meal. But it also has a kind of rustic elegance that makes it good company food too. So here’s the recipe—at least how I’m making it right now.