June 12, 2013

Beach Eats: Scallop & Vegetable Skewers with Wahoo Steak


Honeymooning at the beach gave us the perfect excuse to cook up nightly dinners incorporating fresh seafood and veggies — filled with so much flavor and healthy at the same time. Today we're sharing the recipe for one of the dinner spreads I made that turned out to be one of our favorites from the week — roasted vegetables, scallops and wahoo steak to share.

Skewer Ingredients: (Note I wasn't in the normal E.A.T. kitchen with all my props as some of you may notice — who else feels a little disoriented when not in your regular cooking habitat?).
  • Small red potatoes, halved
  • Pineapple, cubed or chunked
  • Red bell pepper
  • Scallops, rinsed, drained and dried
  • Salt & pepper to taste
To begin, slice, chop and chunk your skewer ingredients. The scallops came in the perfect size for sliding onto the skewer and I cheated by buying already chunked pineapple at the market, so all I needed to do was slice up the red pepper and potatoes to size:


Once all your ingredients are in small pieces, you can create an assembly line of sorts by sliding different pieces onto the skewer — I didn't go in any particular order, but went lighter on the pieces of pineapple per skewer since their sweetness delivered a big enough punch in smaller doses:


Ok, so maybe I went heavier on the scallops too — can you blame me?


Once you've stacked each of your skewers, transfer them to a rimmed sheet or pan and sprinkle with salt and pepper to taste. At this point you can coat with olive oil or a light dressing and let rest (we kept it simple with just salt and pepper). 

Now we're ready to fire up the grill and get these skewers cooking! Here's a little grill cleaning trick I like to use when I don't have a brush on hand. It goes like this — get the grill hot, ball up a sheet of foil and run it briskly over the grill grates:


And voila:


Works like a champ!

So, back to those skewers. Once the grill has reached high heat, carefully lay each skewer over the grates and let them hang out, rotating them about every 3 minutes:


You can tell when it is time to rotate once vegetables begin to soften and roast, and the edges of the scallops turn white:


You can almost smell how fresh these guys are:


As the skewers continue to roast, push them to the lower heat side of the grill, cause it's time to cook some fish!

One of my favorite fishes to grill is Wahoo. Yes, the fish is called wahoo — and it's "wahoo" kinda good. It's one of those steaky fishes that have a meaty texture and thick flake, with no fishy taste whatsoever. Plus, it's really simple to prepare well. I like to cook wahoo just as if I were grilling a big steak — drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper on both sides, allowing to rest before placing on the grill:


Once on the grill, just let it hang out there to do it's thing. No need to flip or move — just let it grill for about 3-4 minutes, then gently flip over and spritz with the juice from a fresh lemon wedge, allowing it to again cook for another 3-4 minutes. It all depends on how hot your grill is:


Flip on each side once more, in the opposite direction if you want to create fancy crosshatched grill marks and you are good to go. This is one of those steaks of fish were there is a fine line to being done and still being moist so watch carefully and do not overcook. I told you it was simple:


When time to serve, gently slide roasted vegetables and scallops from skewers onto serving plate, then top with the wahoo fish steak:


Paired with a couple glasses of wine and more fresh beach sides (more on these to come), we felt like we were feasting like beach kings:


While I wasn't around my normal kitchen or tools, it didn't take long to get acquainted!

What are some of your favorite go-to beach recipes?

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