A great wall, a great find

For years I have ignored the other half of the large strip shopping mall which houses my thrift superstore, but I wandered over there recently and discovered an Asian supermarket called Great Wall.  It had the potatoes and yams and broccoli I buy at 2/3 to half the price I generally pay, and other things I didn't know about, like Japanese yams, and things I wouldn't know how to cook, like many bins of root vegetables.  Bottles of fish and other sweet or tangy sauces were cheaper too.

Best of all was the fish department, which was like being down at the docks after the boats arrive.  Sea scallops were 9.99, whereas they're generally 12-14.99 where I shop.  I love the much smaller bay scallops, and they were 4.99!  I bought 3/4 lb.

I cooked them up over high heat at the stove using my iron skillet which already had 2 or 3 days worth of oils in it from cooking up a package of raw bratwurst sausages I found in my supermarket's clearance section.  I added some more olive oil with grape seed, threw in a dash or of water spice powder was at hand, jerk chicken and fish, Montreal chicken and pepper and salt.  After 2-3 minutes I poured in a generous dollop of the wine I was sipping, then thickened it by pouring in some Panako seasoned seafood bread crumbs, stirred the mess around and reduced the flame to medium and 2-3 minutes later I had a tasty plateful of scallops, green beans and half a Japanese yam.

There's little time-consuming work and no recipe-reading for cooking in my house.  This meal took about four minutes of work at the stove or counter to put on the table, I put the washed yam in the oven at 350 earlier and the canned green beans in the micro at the 3-minure mark.  All my cooking is based upon my experiences as a young man between semesters for four years working during summers at a busy Nantucket seafood restaurant as a dishwasher then fry cook then broiler man, and in a fancy Aspen restaurant under Austrian owners/operators during winters as a salad tosser then breakfast cook then nighttime saute-chef, and I cook by time and temperature, and sight and touch (with a fork of course).