As noted earlier I am planning my menu for supper club this weekend.  I plan on doing a French themed dinner and a couple of the recipes will be new to me.  I decided to test one recipe before supper club — the seared sea scallops.  I figured I’d fix an entree portion for dinner for me and my mom last night.

I purchased 8 scallops (4 for each of us) from Treasure Island.  I started by cooking 2 slices of bacon in a cast iron pan, keeping the bacon grease in the pan after the bacon was done.  I added some olive oil and put the well dried and seasoned (salt and pepper only) scallops in the pan — cooking 5 minutes on the first side and 3 minutes on the second.  Once the scallops were done I wilted a bunch of spinach in the left over grease/oil.  Once the spinach was wilted, I added a tad of butter to create more of a rich sauce.  I then added the cooked bacon and plated the spinach on my 1960s plates.

I placed four scallops on each plate and added the bacon/butter sauce to the scallops.  Who would have thought that the bacon fat and butter turned into a sauce poured over a naturally rich piece of shellfish would be too much.  The whole meal was so rich, we couldn’t handle it.  I finished almost three full scallops while my mom finished 2.5.  It was quite tasty, but way too much food and rich beyond belief.

I know for sure that I won’t ever serve this recipe as an entree — it will totally kill my guests.  I haven’t totally  decided if I’ll serve this on Saturday or not.  If I do, I’ll probably serve a single scallop and spinach — an amuse bouche.

Do you have a less rich way to cook scallops that are a real crowd pleaser?  Have you every been completely surprised by an awfully rich meal?  Have you cooked a meal that was too rich and you could only eat a portion of it?