Garlic and Chive Butter Prawns and Mango, Lime, Mint and Chilli Salsa Scallops

Next month, GG and I will have been together for 3 years, so we figured it was high time that we officially introduced our parents to each other. And given the recent creation of our stunning new patio, the first official patio function was to be a parent-off of sorts. Now given that we have been watching a lot of My Kitchen Rules, we decided we would plan an elaborate three course menu for our parents visit.

Having recently bought 24 white ceramic chinese spoons off ebay for the bargain price of $29.99, including delivery, I felt compelled to incorporate them into the meal. So the weekend before I had a go at different flavour combinations and in the end decided that for entrees we’d go with prawns cooked in a garlic and chive butter and then scallops on a salsa of mango, lime, mint and chilli.

The benefit of both of these was that are super easy to make. The garlic and chive butter can either be chopped up and mixed by hand or if you have the option the Sunbeam Stickmaster is a joy. Throw in the butter, chives and a couple of cloves of garlic and mix, mix, mix.

With the salsa, a nice ripe mango is good, because the sweetness offsets nicely against the heat of the chilli and the zap from the lime. So  dice up the mango, slice up the mint and the chilli (GG’s dad doesn’t like too much heat, so I didn’t add too many seeds on this occasion) and then zest up a lime, and then also squeeze in the juice of about half a lime into the salsa. Mix that together and then pop in a dish in the fridge til needed.

The beauty of cooking seafood is that it is a quick affair. My dad had given me a box of prawns so I peeled 12 of those, and GG had picked us up a dozen scallops from our local seafood store at Mirrabooka Square. We’ve bought a lot of scallops there in the past and they’ve always been nice and fresh and a good size.

So basically I threw the garlic and chive butter mix into a frying pan and got it nice and hot, then threw the prawns in. And they literally take only minutes to cook through. So they then went on the spoons with a little of the sauce for added flavour.

Then take the salsa out of the fridge and add a teaspoonful into 12 of the spoons. The scallops can just be seared in a frying pan (lucky for me I have two :)) and once cooked – again only take a few minutes – you place on top of the salsa. Easy peasy.

So with my 24 spoons it meant that each guest had two prawns and two scallops for their entrees, which after the toasted turkish bread (with olive oil and balsamic vinegar) that we’d had for starters, were fairly comfortable ahead of the mains.