Surf and Turf

Surf and turf is one of the dinners I’ve made the most in the van. Steak with scallops, steak with shrimp, sometimes all three. The steak part I’ve written up already in how I cook a steak, so this one is about the seafood half and how I time everything with one burner and one pan.

The order is always the same: steak first, then scallops while the steak rests, then shrimp, then the sauce. The steak needs to rest anyway, and the seafood cooks fast, so by the time the shrimp are done the steak is ready to cut. Same pan, same butter the whole way through.

This is the one I cooked in San Diego after a morning at the Mission Bay playground. Watch me make it.

Dry them, then get the pan as hot as it goes.

Scallops are the hard part

Getting a good sear on scallops is one of the hardest things for me. One night in San Diego I failed on the scallops completely, I couldn’t get a sear. The problem is water. I take them out of the freezer the same day, so there’s still a lot of water inside. The best way is to leave them in the refrigerator overnight to dry out, but we have a chest fridge with not a lot of room, so I do the best I can with paper towels.

Once I tried a stainless steel pan for the scallops instead of cast iron. I got it as hot as I could, used avocado oil, and checked it with a little water: when the drop beads up and rolls around the pan, it’s ready and they won’t stick. That time the scallops came out pretty good.

The shrimp, and the sauce

Shrimp are the easy part. Salt, pepper, garlic powder, butter. They go last because they’re quick and they pick up everything left in the pan.

Same pan, same butter.

Then I put the steak butter back in with all of it. Garlic flavor, shrimp flavor, scallop flavor. That seafood garlic butter is my dipping sauce for the steak, and it’s so good.

Other ways I’ve done it

Once in San Diego I chopped the shrimp into a paste instead, with salt, pepper and a little garlic powder, and mixed it until it got chewy, I think because you’re adding air to it. I cooked it after the steak and scallops and flattened it in the cast iron into shrimp cakes. Spencer liked them.

In Quartzsite, Arizona, I did steak, pork chops and shrimp. The shrimp went in butter last, and the garlic tomato sauce I made for the pork chops worked really well with the shrimp too.

And at home in New York, my mom and I did a bigger version: live lobsters steamed with minced garlic, Asian style, plus grilled clams and a ribeye on the charcoal grill. The lobsters only take 6 or 7 minutes, so we timed everything to be done at the same time and sat down together.

One lesson with thin steaks: they cook really fast. The ribeyes that night in San Diego were only a little over half an inch, too thin for the thermometer, so I did them by eye and they came out a little past where I wanted. Next time I’ll go even more rare.

Our Thanksgiving in the van

Thanksgiving 2024 we were in Los Angeles, stealth camping around the San Gabriel Valley. Not much was open that day, and we’d been eating out quite a lot in LA, so we stayed in, cooked, played and read with Spencer, and went to the playground in the afternoon. For dinner we cooked our Thanksgiving dinner right in the van. No turkey. What’s better than surf and turf for Thanksgiving? Steak, scallops and shrimp, plus some pan-fried buns from the Shanghai place we went to, warmed up in the cast iron. Watch our Thanksgiving dinner.

Thanksgiving scallops in the cast iron, butter going in.