Scallops with Chipotle-Orange Sauce.

Cooking on Friday nights can be tough. After a long work week, cooking a nice dinner can be a nice distraction but can also be ... just a little more than I feel like doing. With this in mind, and leveraging a sale on scallops at the Co-Op, we made one of our favorite easy dishes last night: Scallops with Chipotle-Orange Sauce.

Its a simple recipe where you brown the scallops with a little salt and paprika, then set them aside and reduce a sauce of orange juice and chipotles in adobo. Oh yes, there is a bit of butter thrown in as well which never hurts. When Meg first found this recipe we wondered how the scallops would stand up to the chipotles and indeed this is a tricky balance.

I've made it a couple times before and it has always hinted at excellence but I've always missed the mark in some way. The first effort was good but the sauce was not quite right (I rarely have the fortitude to properly reduce a sauce), the second effort too hot (chipotles in adobo need to be used carefully) so I was trying to actually refine and improve my efforts. 

I didn't perfect it but I did improve. First I got the heat right - for the canned Goya chipotles we get, a full tablespoon will definitely overwhelm the scallops so I cut back a bit. I also got the sauce reduction right, maintaining a high enough heat that the sauce thickened up nicely. 

Sadly I failed at the one thing that I pride myself on getting right: I overcooked the scallops. Not drastically but noticeably. I cooked at the right temperature to get the browned bits for the sauce but 3 minutes per side is way too much at that heat level. I'll back off a bit next time.

We served them with crispy green beans and rice and dinner was delicious.

A footnote: I was reading through a trial copy of Cook's Country that arrived in the mail a couple weeks ago and noticed a short reader comment about being unable to make good sauces in non-stick pans. If you're making a sauce that relies on the browned bits from, in this case scallops, you just don't get the same kind of browning when using a non-stick pan. So for this recipe, I used our simple stainless steel frying pan and both the browning and the sauce came out great, with good flavor from the scallops.

Buvez: Maybe in the future I'll just include this if we don't pair our dinner with the Big-A IPA from Smuttynose Brewery. Actually this Imperial IPA is a perfect match for the spicy sea taste of this dish.