Bacon wrapped scallops & giant asparagus!...

Cooking w/ Fulton Stall market goodies:

Scallops from Shore Catch, purple asparagus from Sang Lee Farms. The asparagus is amazing--just gorgeous, crisp, refreshing--I'd eat it raw if anything. I still have one bunch left. Never would've thought asparagus was good to eat raw but these ones from Sang Lee are effin' fannnntastic. Not fibrous in the least, sturdy stalks, really robust. Wish I had had a small bunch of regular asparagus from the grocery store to do side by side comparison but...here u go :)

I have to say tho--I truly despise pan-frying with bacon. On the second batch I burned the garlic so that can't have helped. But the underlying problem is the heavy grease smell that lingers in the air that's like in a thick of mist infused with lard rendering. The bacon was a little thick so it took a while to cook thru. With how hot the oil was and how long I had to cook (and the number of batches), it was just vastly irritating even with the stove fan on and my swabbing down the pan after finishing a batch.

Maybe I'm just doing something wrong--maybe I should've broiled it in the oven after slightly browning the scallops. Maybe I should've taken the garlic out a lot faster. Maybe I should've used thinner slices of bacon. MAYBE A LOT OF THINGS. But it was just a dense mist of stifling bacon cooked humidity!! Not really dense but i mean it LINGERED for long time and I DON'T LIKE IT!!! I HATE BACON WRAPPED CRAP! I really probably should've oven baked after browning like I do my sea bass. Hrmm. Whatever. I'll try it some other time but I'll stick to my damn prosciutto and pancetta.

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THat's kind of the other thing--u realize how shitty general-quality stuff is and u start to realize how unhealthy it all breaks down. That SMELL! If you watch BBC America, there's the show "You Are What You Eat" or something like that and it breaks down a lot of esoteric but...simple things about how food translates into your body when it digests it. Down to the general body odor, geography of your tongue (too much salt makes those little bumps on ur tongue stand out more, and 'white'-ish), etc.

I dunno--maybe I'm drinking their kool-aid but after this, I realy can see the significance in cooking with certain type of oils, how 'healthy' they are or how 'flavorful' they are without just masking it in the general enhancement of cooking in any chunk of 'fat'. I'm not feeling particularly articulate right now--it's like a fiery net of clustered thoughts that's picking up momentum without any particular linear direction for coherent expression :P BUT YES, there IS a TANGIBLE DIFFERENCE in the kinds of FATS you use and all that CRAP and quality of ingredients in relation to health, more so than I previously thought.