strip steak and scallops

My schedule is completely bolloxed. I am not getting hungry during the day when I should be getting hungry and then suddenly feeling quite starved at the oddest hours late at night when reasonable people are gone to sleep. Today on my escapades I had food offered to me four separate times and I instinctively kindly refused each time. One fellow looked crestfallen. I deftly rescued the situation by telling him that if I started on his potato and cheese soup, which did indeed look delicious, I would eat the whole pot. The fellow grinned from ear to ear signaling I had delivered the perfect lie. 

I think that this is one of the chief differences between thin and fat people. Thin people eat when they're hungry and don't eat when they're not hungry. Fat people eat for any number of reasons, like because it's there. 

The steak up there↑is sliced and divided to show the inside. Obviously it wouldn't be plated that way for entertaining. I do these things here for you.

Surf and Turf if you're feeling cheeky, splash and moo if childish. 

The scallops were frozen. Both the steak and the scallops needed to come up to room temperature so they were covered with cling film. 

I hadn't anticipated wrapping scallops with bacon so a week ago this package of bacon was cut in half the way dear ol' mum used to do when she cooked so that the strips would fit in the pan she used. I asked her one time, "Please don't do that." 

"Why?" She inquired. 

"So I can have the joy and fun of long bacons, for once." 

She kindly obliged the request of a child, and that's my mum for you, she always understood the vital importance of fun. But here I had already cut the bacon, which I never usually do, and now I need them to be full length. This means trouble for wrapping the scallops. It will take two toothpicks each instead of just one if the strips cooperate at all. The bacon is cooked half way to give it a head start over the scallops which cook faster than bacon crisps. This is a handy thing to do with rumaki as well. In the case of rumaki you will want bacon in half strips since the circumference is half that of sea scallops. I intended to include a swipe of brown sugar on the bacon as you do with rumaki, and I brought out the brown sugar from the freezer for that purpose, but then I forgot about it and didn't notice until the bacon was already pinned to the scallops with their toothpicks, so I left them unsweetened and they were less delicious because of that. And all that goes to show you not to cut your bacon in half because it can cause you to forget the brown sugar. 

Rest teim. 

Not shown: Frozen sweet corn combined with whole pecans and ricotta, s/p, heated through, and that's all. Originally, I was thinking of mixing spinach with it, but decided not to act on that impulse. 

This concludes the strip steak and scallop dinner. 

What follows properly belongs to a future post. These pictures are included now because I want to show how we food-obsessed blokes who make most our own meals do things. I will need a baguette tomorrow, at least I think I will need one, and so because I prefer to age dough overnight for an ever so slight country-loaf effect and for the magic that slowness imparts, the dough is started tonight. The dough will proceed in slow motion overnight and achieve peak activity by morning whereupon the dough will be stretched, the yeast cells within redistributed by that stretching and so re-enlivened by propinquity to like-minded pervy horny little yeasties of corresponding type, and the loaf proofed again briefly left in peace encouraging that microscopic orgy, and then abruptly baked killing all at once those nefarious little bastards. 

So the larger copies of these pictures will appear again tomorrow.