Scallops and Butternut Squash

Irregular updates seem to be a bit of a theme with me, but school will do that to you I suppose.

Anyway, today’s dinner came together as one of those “Lets see what I have in the fridge,” affiars. That’s quite common to me, as I usually don’t plan out what I’m eating more than a few hours in advance. So when I went and visited my grandparents on Thanksgiving I walked away with 2 butternut squashes, homegrown by one of their friends. So I’ve been keeping them around for these few weeks trying to come up with good things to do with them. Well I made soup with one of them, which was kind of disappointing, so I will have to try it again and get it the way I like it before I pass the recipe on. But today I realized that I had some scallops in the fridge from Trader Joes, so I thought I would whip up some seared scallops and butternut squash puree. This turned out rather nicely, so I added some toasted Parmesean bread on the side, as I thought the dish could use the dry contrast of the toasted bread to the soft scallops and squash.

This dish was actually quite easy to make, although it did take a decent amount of time.
You will need:
1 Large Butternut Squash
12 or so Large Scallops
Several Slices of good bread (slightly stale bread works even better for this)
Parmesan Cheese (I prefer to use the slab of Parmesan, as opposed to a shaker here because it tastes better and melts on the bread better, but if you have nothing else I guess that work.)
Butter
Salt and Pepper
Olive Oil

So as you can, ingredients wise, this is rather simple.

First, skin, the butternut squash, and remove the seeds. (This is a deceptively difficult step, as butternut squash are very hard and have tough skins. Use a sharp knife and be VERY careful! Skin it first, then cut in half, and remove the seeds with a spoon)
Then cut the squash into pieces no bigger than 1 in square. (They don’t really have to be uniform, you are going to mash them anyway, it just makes cooking easier.)
Then put them in a pot of boiling water until the are soft enough to poke with a fork easily (about 10-15 min.) Enjoy the smell, its awesome!
While this is going on, preheat your oven to about 400-425 degrees.
Take your bread, and cut it into decent size pieces. You are going to be picking these up and eating them with your hands so they should be maybe bruschetta size.
Put the bread on a cookie sheet or roasting pan, and drizzle with olive oil.
Pop these in your oven.
After maybe 10 minutes when these are a bit crispy open up the oven, and throw the cheese on top. The close up the oven again and cook until everything is nice and melty.
MMm, Delicious...

When your Butternut Squash is ready drain them out of the pot, leaving just a bit of the water left. (Lacking a strainer I just used a slotted spoon to transfer the squash pieces from one pot to the other, then added a few spoonfuls of the water afterwards)
Add a hunk of butter to the squash and mash as if you were making mashed potatoes

Here I am going to go on a bit of a tangent about the wonders of my new immersion blender. I bought this off amazon to make my squash soup and it is my new favorite toy. It makes everything! I made soup with it. I made amazing mashed potatoes for Shepherd's Pies and I used it to puree the squash. Its amazing. I love it.

Anyway, so now you should have an awesomely delicious squash puree. Add some salt and pepper to that, just a bit, to make the taste pop a bit more.

Now, in a frying pan, turn the heat all the way up and add some butter and olive oil. Once that is nice and hot, add your scallops.
This is the tricky part. Scallops cook REALLY quickly, your whole thing will be done in less than 5 minutes, so you should have everything else basically done at this point, because you really need to only pay attention to the scallops.
So when you just have raw scallops, notice how flabby and sort of jello-y they are. When you cook them they firm up, but if you cook them too much they firm up to rubber. You want them in a nice middle where you can easily cut them with a fork, and they are incredibly tender, but not raw.
So you basically have to watch them.
So throw them into the frying pan, and let them cook for about 2 minutes. Then flip them over and cook them for another 2 minutes. If you’ve done this right, the outsides should just have hints of brown on them, and the insides should be a good solid white (not the sort of translucenty color that the raw ones are.)
If you can just slice through them with a fork with no problem you are great!

Now all you need to do is throw it on a plate and eat!
Lay down a bed of the Squash, and put the scallops on top. Add the bread to the side and enjoy!

I paired this with a Harpoon Winter Warmer, which was a nice ale with a rather good amount of spice flavor that went with the scallops quite nicely.

Here’s a picture of the final product!
Happy eating!