Father's Day: Scallops and King Crab Legs

So, back to our Father's Day menu. It appears I started with dessert first, but the savory dishes were just as delicious.

DH requested king crab legs. While buying the crab legs, I also bought a few scallops totally on impulse. I'm not terribly enamored of scallops - something about the texture - but DH loves them and I thought that Father's Day would be the perfect day to treat him. Since I've never actually cooked scallops myself, I had no plan whatsoever, but I knew we'd come up with something.

Grilled Scallops with Basil Stuffing

I went to my reliable resource, the CLBB, and came upon this recipe which is apparently from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. We had the lemons and garlic on hand and we had just enough basil in the garden to stuff the eight scallops I bought, so this jumped out at me. I was also intrigued by the idea of grilling the scallops. As I said, I'm not crazy about scallops but everything is better on the grill, right?

These were fantastic - DH raved and I might have changed my mind about scallops. While it takes a bit of time to slit each scallop and stuff them with the basil-garlic mixture, it's by no means a difficult recipe and with our small portion, it went pretty quickly. Just make sure to use plenty of extra-virgin olive oil on your scallops and on the grill or grill pan to keep them from sticking and things will work out fine. We chickened out of doing them directly on the grill rack, so we used our nonstick grill pan which is why we ended up with grill polka dots instead of the classic grill stripes. A little goofy looking, but it worked and certainly didn't hurt the flavor one bit.

We also did the crab legs on the grill which seemed to work pretty well. No recipe there, just following the package directions to basically grill them about 3 minutes on each side.

No recipe here either, but we did manage to fit in one veggie/fruit dish by serving a spinach, strawberry and toasted pecan salad with a strawberry vinaigrette. This Father's Day largely on the fresh strawberries we picked.....maybe it will become a tradition.