I cooked this for our lunch date (last 2005). It's a simple dish but it was fantastic! Enrique loved it as well. To complete the menu, I served this dish with a simple linguine and salad.
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Scallops and Bacon
This is one of my favourites: it has just the right balance between nursery comfort and dining-room elegance and takes hardly any time to cook - and thus is just what you need after a hard day's work. Properly speaking, it is more of a starter or savoury, but when there's just two of you eating, it makes a perfect supper almost in its entirety; all I'd add is a dark and leafy salad, dressed with walnut oil and lemon juice.
Ingredients
1 teaspoon oil
4 rashers streaky bacon, cut in half across
10 scallops
1 tablespoon seasoned flour
1 tablespoon butter, optional
quarter cup dry sherry
fresh parsley
1. Put a teaspoon of oil in a thick-bottomed frying pan and when hot add the strips of bacon. Cook until crisp and remove.
2. Separate the white flesh of the scallops from the corals, cut them in half horizontally if they are very fat, and dredge the fat white discs all over in the flour.
3. Add the butter to the pan if the bacon hasn't made much fat and over a low to medium heat fry the floury scallops, turning after about 3 minutes and cooking on the other side for about another 2, or until they are cooked, but only just. Now add the corals (if using) to the pan and just turn them in the butter for a minute and remove.
4. Put the scallops, their corals and the bacon on a plate.
5. Over the heat add the sherry to the pan and pour it over the scallops and bacon.
6. Sprinkle with freshly chopped parsley and there you have it.
Serves 2.
