Sea Scallops

Sea scallops are popular seafood items.  Prized by cooks and diners, they are considered by many to be the most appealing of the shellfish.  The premium products among scallops are the largest specimens, which have a delicate flavor and tender texture.  Scallops are at their peak flavor when fresh, but may also be frozen.

Scallops are bivalve mollusks.  Various members of the scallop family are found worldwide.  The edible portion is the adductor muscle of scallops.  The muscle is larger and more developed than most shellfish because they are active swimmers.  Scallop shells are symmetrical, attractive and highly collected by sea shell enthusiasts.  Scallops can swim by rapidly opening and closing their shells.  This method of propulsion is used as a escape technique when threatened.

Commercial Scallop Harvesting

Scallops thrive off the mid and North Atlantic Coast of North America.  Here scallops are found in offshore waters out to the continental slope.  Ports that are important to the scallop industry range from Glouster, Massachusetts down to Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Cape May, New Jersey, Chincoteague Island Virginia and Virginia Beach all have active fleets of scallop boats.  Scallops are trawled or dredged, and quickly returned to port or shucked at sea and kept on ice for the trip ashore.  The commercial scallop fishery in the USA is heavily regulated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Cooking Scallops

Scallops are prepared in a variety of ways.  Their delicate flavor and texture allow for a variety of cooking methods.  They can be easily breaded and fried, sautéed, broiled or used in seafood soups, stews, chowders or salads.  One of the most popular recipes calls for scallops to be wrapped in bacon, then broiled.

The scallops' versatility in taste lends itself well to various cuisines from around the world.  In addition to American dishes, sea scallops are a frequent ingredient of Asian, Mediterranean and South American cuisine.  Japanese cooking utilizes scallops in sashimi and sushi dishes as well as using the scallop roe as an ingredient.

The Iron Chef

Do you remember that old television series about cooking called ''Iron Chef'' which ran from 1993 to 2002?  Since over 300 episodes of that show have been aired (and are still actually in syndication today), I'm pretty sure that anyone remotely interested in the culinary arts will remember that show.  So, who was your favorite chef on that landmark cooking program?  Chances are, you will select Chen Kenichi, better known as Iron Chef Chinese.  Kenichi was the only Iron Chef to be on the show from start to finish.  In addition, Chen won the Iron Chef competition 67 times and is now widely regarded as one of the great chefs of the world.

Born on January 5, 1956, Chen is actually the son of another great chef, Chen Kenmin, who is known in Japan as the father of Sichuan cuisine.

You can tell his father's influence on Chen by his choice of his special dish, ''Prawns in Chili Sauce,'' which was inspired by a similar dish introduced by his father in Japan.  Naturally, where several generations of excellence are involved in the same area of endeavor, comparisons between father and son are inevitable.  The same applied to the Chen father-and-son combo as well.  But the spectacular success of the younger Chen on the Iron Chef series has established in many minds that he is the superior chef between the two.

Since leaving the show, Chen has continued to be a successful chef.  He currently runs the restaurant chain Shisen Hanten in Japan, which is a huge commercial success, with outlets in Akasaka, Ikebukuro, Roppongi, Tokushima, Kure (Hiroshima Prefecture), Matsuyama and Hakata

Ironically, it was the success of Chen's restaurant chain that almost prompted him to leave the show.  Ironically, and this is a little known story, it was Chen's rival on the show, the so-called Iron Chef French Hiroyuki Sakai, who prevailed up Chen to stay, smartly pointing out that the show would not be the same without Chen aboard, which was probably true.  The two rivals shook hands and agreed as gentlemen that if either one of them left the show, so would the other.  Both great chefs honored the gentleman's agreement until the very last episode of the show's decade-long run.

Japanese Cooking

Do you love Japanese food?  The funny thing about Japanese food is that you either love it or you hate it.  There is no in-between.  And chances are, if you hate it, you probably haven't really tasted Japanese food yet or haven't given yourself a chance to sample it enough.  Japanese food is hard to appreciate after only one bite.  And sometimes, the idea that you are tasting raw food just won't escape your mind that you are already predisposed to hating Japanese food even before you actually taste it.

Personally, I love Japanese food.  There really is no other cuisine like it in the world in terms of its unique taste and presentation.  Who would believe that something so raw could be so delicious?  For those of you who have not yet discovered the pleasures of Japanese food, allow me to present the following primer.

The standard Japanese meal always involves a bowl of white rice as well as soup and side dishes such as pickles, vegetables, meat and fish.  Japanese food is classified by the number of viands or ''okazu'' that are served with the rice, soup and side dishes.  A meal with one okazu is called ichiju-issai and a prime example of this is the traditional Japanese breakfast which consists of miso soup, rice, grilled fish and one pickled vegetable.

The regular Japanese meal usually involves three okazu to go along with the soup, rice and pickles.  Traditionally, each of these three okazu are cooked in a different way from the others.  They can either be served raw or grilled, simmered, steamed or deep fried.

Another hallmark of Japanese food is seafood, which is the most popular and most widely consumed food in Japan.  The most popular dishes include all types of fish as well as shellfish, squid and octopus.  Crab is another favorite delicacy and so are whale and seaweed.  Despite the fact that Japanese are not heavy meat eaters, you will hardly find any vegetarians among them either probably owing to their deep fashion for seafood.  Beef and chicken are also popular among the Japanese.

Drinking Tea

The second most consumed beverage behind water is tea.  Interestingly enough the 3,200,000 tones of tea produced worldwide come from only one plant species, named "camellia sinensis".  But how a plant becomes a beverage?  Tea is made by steeping processed leaves, buds, or twigs of the tea bush in hot water for a few minutes, a great variety of tea tastes, aromas and colors can excite even the more skeptical drinker.  If you do like tea drinking, but simply never had the opportunity to learn more about it beyond the fact that you enjoy it, you should know that there are thousands of kinds of tea offered on today's market.  Shades in flavor derive from the region of cultivation and the method of processing the tea leaves.  It is the processing techniques that produce the four simple tea categories are considered the art of tea making.  In its most basic form, processing is the taking of the raw green leaves and deciding whether or not, and how much oxidation (or fermentation) should take place before drying them out.  Oxidation is the reaction of the enzymes contained in tea leaves when they are broken, bruised or crushed.

The first category is that of black tea.  Black tea is nothing more than the leaves of the camellia sinensis after being exposed to 8-24 hours of open air.  After the leaves are picked up they are spread out to let the water they contain evaporate.  You have probably witnessed it happening to a flower that is left without being watered.  The foliage curls up and begins to dry.  After this part of the process, the tea leaves are balled into rolls that encourage oxidization.  When fully oxidized, the leaves turn into a rich black color.  Tea producers then put the tea leaves into the final drying period before sorting and packaging them.

Oolong tea is another tea category and is considered to be the most difficult of the four types of teas to process.  The best way to describe oolong tea is that it is somewhere in between green and black tea.  This is because the leaves are only partially oxidized during the processing.  As with black tea, the leaves are spread out to dry for 8-24 hours, but after that, they are tossed about in a basket in order to create a bruising and partial exposure to the air.  The final step involves steaming the leaves, which neutralizes the enzymes in the tea and prevents further oxidization.

Green teas, like white teas, are closer to tasting like fresh leaves of grass that the other two tea categories.  This type of tea is also lower in caffeine and has higher antioxidant properties.  The whole process of creating green tea revolves around preventing oxidization from taking place in the leaves.  Though the tea leaves are sometimes laid out to dry for a few hours, then, in order to neutralize the enzymes and prevent further oxidation, the leaves are steamed or pan fried.  It is this very technique which results in the preservation of the enzymes which have recently become the focus of medical research.  After steaming, the leaves are rolled up, still quite green in color.

Finally, white tea has recently become a popular item in the west as it is the least processed tea and thus tastes the most like fresh leaves or grass.  White tea is made of the little buds of the tea plant.  Again like green tea, white tea is steamed or pan fried to prevent any kind of oxidization, and great care is taken to avoid bruising or crushing the tea.  The dried buds have a silver-like appearance because the tiny white hairs of new growth are still present.