In the kitchen

I will have to admit, as far as kitchen skills go, I am not a great contender.  My biggest concern coming to Scotland was finding a can of cocoa powder to feed my insatiable need for hot chocolate, and then there was all that stuff about cooking food and eating things to maintain a conscious life (as I have said before, fainting from hunger is embarrassing).  So I was able to trot off to a local grocery store and obtain the holy grail of cocoa powder: a large canister of the stuff.  Now we are not talking drinking chocolate or those hideous packets of mix-in-hot-water stuff regardless of tiny marshmallows in the mix, I am talking baking cocoa.  The stuff you have to lovingly mix just right or it is ruined.  (If you have never tried hot chocolate with baking cocoa and are deluding yourself with said packets, I dare you to try it:  one to two heaping teaspoons of baking cocoa, the same amount of table sugar, add dribbles of milk one at a time while stirring.  Once it forms a paste looser than peanut butter, you can add the rest of the milk and stir to mix.  Nuke til hot or heat on the stove if you still live in the stone age.  Adjusting the amount of cocoa powder and sugar make the drink either milk chocolaty or dark chocolaty as you prefer.  Add one scant drop of vanilla extract and float off into chocolaty goodness)  sigh...

So, having purchased the cocoa powder, I am eager to make some hot chocolate.  As they have generously supplied the sugar, I head to the sugar canister to scoop some up and never anticipated this:  Packets of sugar!!  Not kidding.  How many packets of sugar equal about a tablespoon?  Quite a lot.  How many packets are left after two weeks?  Not a lot.  I'll have to order more.

After fun with cocoa, I went to oatmeal.  How hard could that be?  After all it is a simple ratio of water to oats just like rice and homemade syrup.  Here are the instructions on the bag of oats: for best results cook on the hob.  Allow approximately 50g oats per person.  Place oats in a small sauce pan and add 300ml cold water.  Alternatively milk may be used instead of water to give a more luxurious, creamy porridge.  Bring gently to the boil and simmer for 2-3 minutes, stirring continuously.  Add sugar or salt                                                                                     to taste.  DO NOT REHEAT.

There were no measuring cups to use, just the scale.  Could this giant scale actually measure out a scant 50g?  That would be the first 5 lines on the scale.  Most scales aren't very accurate under the first 10 parts.  But I'll give it a whirl.  So, I assumed the 50g goes with the 300ml for one serving and measured it out.  Worked out great!  Never made anything by weighing the ingredients before.  And the scale was quite accurate.  It even measured the weight of the paper towel.

There's two down, actually three down.  On my first night here I made rice with no measuring cups.  I did have a teacup, so I made rice like my grandmother did.  One teacup of rice, two teacups of water.  Done deal.  The next challenge:  seafood.  As it happens, a seafood truck comes once a week to the resort and sells freshly caught seafood.  How can you pass that up?  Now I am a lover of Minnesota seafood, you know, the stuff that comes from Red Lobster.  Nobody knows how it actually gets here still fresh, but it magically does (we being so close to the coast and all).  I have heard from those people on TV who claim that really fresh seafood is sweet.  Or at least it has a sweetness to it.  Like coconut shrimp at Red Lobster...mmmm...shrimp...

Anyway, my longtime standing favorite is scallops.  I've only had them about three times in my life, but remember liking them quite a lot.  So logic dictates that fresh scallops should be better than the magical whatever we get in Minnesota, so I bought some.  And I asked the fish guy how to cook them.  He said cook them on the hob, not at the highest number, but just one less.  Flip them when they are toasty and cook the other side the same.  I can handle that.  I ordered three and thanked him and took my treasures home to cook them.  

First thing I notice, is that the scallop is not just a round chunk, but it has another fleshy bit hanging off the side with an orange tip.  Don't know if you eat it or cut it off, so I left it and fried them up just like the guy said to.

Regular magic Minnesota scallops, if you've ever had them, are a bit tough, stringy, and a bit fishy.  And if you are lucky, they have a bit of grit in them somewhere that surprises you halfway through chewing.  Scottish caught sea scallops cooked the way the fish guy said to cook them are soft, creamy, and weird tasting.  I can't even explain what it tastes like.  I did eat them.  I am not sure I enjoyed them.  But the TV guys are right, they do have a sweetness to them.  Not sweet like sugar, but sweet like fresh water, if that makes sense.

Notice the extra bits that are orange?  They are orange all the way through!  I did not eat them.  Andrew Zimmern i am not.  Yick.