Sunday 11 November 2007

Leftover Scallops


So, I bought too many scallops for the chicchi salad. And being what they are, I really needed to use them the following day. I'd been craving cauliflower soup (it's been soup weather for a couple of weeks now!) so I decided to combine the two.

Some of the best meals I have ever had involved cauliflower and seafood: my New Years' Eve dinner of a few years ago where I served cauliflower puree with toast and Yarra Valley salmon roe; the birthday cocktails of the year before that where Chinese soup spoons of cauliflower skordalia were topped with scallops and pink grapefruit; lunch at le Manoir in September. So I know it is a combination that works.

I sauteed a diced onion, chucked in a cauliflower, broken into florets, added water to not quite cover with a slurp of Touch of Taste veg stock and put a lid on it. About 10 minutes later, I crumbled in some fairly basic stilton cheese, attacked the pot with a stick blender and added some cream. The scallops went into a hot pan and there it was. And it looked horrible. The soup had turned a pale green from the stilton and the whole thing was pale and unappetising. It was too dark out to get parsley, so I added a spoonful of lumpfish caviar, just to add some visual appeal. I think it worked.

1 comment:

lapetitepipistrelle said...

Sounds delicious, I think I may steal that idea off you!

Cauli and truffles do have a mysterious affinity for scallops, it's such an oddly successful combination: the earthy and the ethereal. Well, hang on, scallops... ethereal... h'mm, maybe not, indecent jokes about shellfish come to mind (which would explain the truffle oil harmony)... OK, never mind. I think I just wanted a nice assonance.

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