Expirmental Cooking - take 1

Last week I took my first foray into creative cooking. It wasn’t a total failure. I was going for something like this:

It didn’t quite live up to my expectation, but it was definitely edible. I grabbed an easy recipe on allrecipes.com for sautéing the scallops (which I had never even thought about cooking before our Cincinnati trip) and making a sauce. The comments on the recipe said that it was super easy to add to and make your own, so I thought it would be perfect.

Here are my ingredients:

Frozen Scallops (bought at Aldi)
1 lemon
Garlic powder
Fettuccine noodles
Parmesan cheese
Peas
Butter, salt, pepper

I cooked about half of the bag of scallops in butter and garlic powder, adding some Parmesan cheese on top to give them a little crust. That was a massive fail didn’t work out as well as I had hoped. The cheese that didn’t land on the scallops very quickly burned in my skillet, ruining the butter base for my sauce. I gave up on cooking the rest of them.

I boiled the noodles like normal and cooked the peas in the microwave (lazy cook here!). I started over with the sauce. I melted butter and added the garlic powder, salt, and lemon juice. Then I tossed it all together in a big bowl with more cheese and got this:

I thought it tasted a little bit bland. The flavor was very light, which I liked, but there wasn’t enough of it. Brandon loved it though – I will deem this as a success!

I  baked the rest of the scallops the next night. I put them in a pan, poured melted butter, some garlic salt, lemon pepper seasoning, and some lemon juice over them. They held the flavor so much better! I threw them in the pasta for leftovers and the flavor really stood out.

If I do this recipe again, I might substitute the butter for olive oil and double the lemon juice, and maybe add some additional spices to give it a little more punch.

Stay tuned for my creative dessert too!!