What's 4 Dinner Recipes

My mother, being mom extraordinaire, sent me a bunch of recipes to try that meet with the dietary requirements. One of them was for baked scallops, and one was for lemon-garlic tilapia. James isn't a huge fan of scallops, but he'll try anything I make at least once, and as long as he doesn't say "It tastes bad," he's free to say it's not his cup of tea and make something else. Apparently a "back-up plan" means different things to the two of us, so James was stuck with something he didn't particularly feel like eating.

Pre sauce and cooking

The baked scallops recipe says it makes enough for four, so I halved the scallops, but kept what I figured would be the sauce the same. It's super easy to make. Just crumble up Ritz crackers for the buttery round crackers or use breadcrumbs. Add in the garlic and the pepper. I would recommend trying lemon pepper since that would complement the lemon part that comes next. After rinsing the scallops off and patting them dry, cover them in the breadcrumbs and lay them in a lightly greased glass baking dish.

Post cooking. Our stove is not even...

For the "sauce" I mixed together the melted butter, lemon juice and and wine, then poured it over the scallops. Since I hadn't halved the sauce, there was a lot of it and the scallops ended up in a bit of a soup. We popped it in the oven for about 15 minutes til the scallops looked nice and cooked. There was still a lot of the sauce left bubbling away in the pan, but I scooped out the scallops and served them up. Maybe I didn't cook them long enough or maybe it was too much of the sauce, but it was not the experience I expected. I love scallops. But these scallops tasted awfully fishy, were rubbery and the sauce tasted like the alcohol of the wine hadn't burned off completely. I ate them anyway (James did not), but I would not recommend baking scallops. If you're going to make scallops, I would sautee them with white wine, butter and lemon. Or go to McCormick and Schmick's and get their scallops with the carrot-chipotle sauce (delicious!). If you want to try the recipe, feel free, but I will stick to sauteeing scallops from now on.

The lemon garlic tilapia was delicious! We had pretty much everything we needed except for the filets, so James picked some up on the way home. We decided to grill the tilapia, so we used aluminum foil to make little packets and put each filet into a separate packet. We added the lemon juice, the butter and the garlic to the fish, then James folded up the packets and put them on the grill. At this point, I remembered that we hadn't added the pepper. Genius, right? James does the cooking of meat and fish since I'm always worried I'll undercook it, so he took care of the grill and when he pulled the tilapia off the grill it was perfectly white and flaky. The filets stuck to the foil, so I would recommend spraying the foil with pam or something before grilling. I would also add a lot more lemon juice than the recipe calls for and add the lemon pepper before grilling the fish. Despite the pepper mishap, the fish turned out delicious. We added some lemon pepper to the fish after plating it and heated up some mashed potatoes as a side dish. All in all it was a delicious satisfying dinner. However, both James and I ate two filets on our own, so I would say the recipe serves two, not four. If you're looking for an easy, quick and yummy weeknight dinner, I would totally recommend this recipe. Tilapia isn't very fishy, and cooking the fish in the aluminum foil seals in the flavour. Sorry, no pictures of the tilapia, but we were hungry that night.

One thumbs down, one thumbs up and another day closer to getting those dietary restrictions lifted. It's not so bad when we cook, but going out is nearly impossible. So we're off to hunt another recipe for tonight's meal: curried rice and shrimp anyone?