Cooking Light Test Kitchen: Scallions and Asparagus

My mission: To cook 5 recipes from Cooking Light Magazine each month.

I recently ordered a subscription to Cooking Light Magazine and I must say it's pretty awesome. There are about 10 recipes I will try in this months magazine. They also have a great website that lets you search all the recipes in the magazine. I seriously have no idea what they are thinking by doing this. Here are the first 2 dishes I prepared for the month of March:

Scallops with Spinach and Paprika Syrup

Here's the recipe and here's what I thought:

1/4 a cup of sugar? Really? Have you ever measured out a quarter of a cup of sugar? It just keeps going! I'm not making cupcakes I'm making fish here. The syrup wasn't actually that bad. The lemon cut down on the sweetness but it was still more sweet than I like normally. A quarter a teaspoon is just silly to measure so I'm certain I went over on the ground red pepper and the paprika. I didn't get jumbo sea scallops. I got farm raised scallops. They were okay. I think next time I will spring for real scallops. I just couldn't get them to cook properly. Before I started I checked out Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything and he says to salt and pepper scallops on the pan instead of beforehand. So I did that and I also took his advice and warmed them up after the spinach was done. It really helped the dish. 

I over cooked the spinach because I'm a dummy but all in all it came out okay. If I did star ratings or sporks or whatever I would give it a 2 out of 5. It was good but not great. The syrup was too sweet and I should have used sea scallops and not farm raised scallops. 

Asparagus with Balsamic Tomatoes

First things first: Wow! My pictures look really crappy compared to the recipe photo. Photos aside this recipe is wonderful. I loved the texture of the goats cheese and the grape tomatoes. The recipe says this is 69 calories but I highly doubt that. I surely used more than a teaspoon of olive oil.  I would make this dish again and again. It's a fun spring dish and the colors really pop. I've never had goats cheese before and it's an interesting cheese. Pungent and an odd consistency, but I dug it. The balsamic vinegar really tied the whole dish together. I'd give this 4 out of 5 stars. 

Overall a pretty good night of cooking for me. I got to try some new combinations on beloved dishes (asparagus) and a brand new dish that I hope I will get better at cooking (scallops). My only issue with these dishes is that both of them really needed to be served right when they were plated. Any longer and the cheese would melt or the scallops would get cold. I cooked and ate the asparagus first and then went to work on the scallops. The magazine has these recipes back to back in their "Superfast 20 minute cooking" section but if you tried to make these two dishes for your family it would be impossible to get done right unless you had a helper.  Just sayin.