Cooking: Pea Purée with Scallops and Shrimp

I'd been wanting to get cheffy and change up my rotation. When I saw a pea purée recipe in Food and Wine, I cooked the English peas that were leftover from my pasta dish last week along with the shrimp and scallops I picked up from the fish counter.

Get your mise en place on, and you're all set. Season the scallops and shrimp and then make the pea purée which you can make an hour ahead of time. Boil fresh peas in salted water for 4 minutes, 2 minutes if the peas are frozen. Then pulverize the peas with a tablespoon of mint, a tablespoon of Parmesan cheese, a clove of garlic and lemon zest. Reserve some of the boiling salted water to thin the purée to your liking. I then ladled the pea purée onto pasta bowls, ready for final plating and headed to the neighbors with my glass of Chardonnay until it was time to cook dinner.

Cooking takes just a few minutes after all the prep. Sear the seafood: 2 minutes per side of the scallops and a minute per side of the shrimp (they were pretty petite). And since the pea purée was already plated, I zapped it in the microwave for 15 seconds at a time while the fish was grilling. There was some pan juice from the scallops and shrimp to which I added a dab of butter and a few squeezes of lemon which I simmered and reduced before spooning over the seafood. I also had blanched the sugar snap peas (also leftover from my pasta dish) and tossed while hot in butter.

Beautiful right? I even impressed myself and fancied myself as able as any professional chef. But shoot I forgot to garnish so as to let a diner know what’s in the dinner.

And so I sprinkled lemon zest and baby mint leaves on my dish, which had double the portions of hubs' dish because I was hungry. There is still some leftover pea purée and sugar snap peas, which will turn into a later dinner on which I need to figure out what kind of protein to put on top. Salmon I think, which I can pick up from the Japanese supermarket down the street.