Scallops, Corn & Peppers - Shopping for Fresh Ingredients

Todd Gray: Hi! I am Todd Gray from Equinox Restaurant. Today we are going to be preparing Pan Seared Sea Scallops with sweet corn and red peppers. We are at the grocery store to pick up our ingredients. Remember to always shop at a quality grocery store to get the best and freshest ingredients to make your cooking as good as it can be. Let's go shopping.

We are now at the sea food department where we are going to be selecting some of our jumbo sea scallops. This is our Sea Food Manager, Mr. Reggie Stokes and Reggie is going to give me a couple of these scallops, we will take a look at them. These are these beautiful dry packed sea scallops. We can see that they are nice and dry, nice firm to touch, nice scent of the ocean. It's going to give me some nice finished product when we sear these scallops to give us a good caramelization.

We can keep these for about two or three days in the refrigerator or we can put them in the freezer for up to a month. Reggie, let's head and gather our other ingredients. We are at the produce department where I have found some beautiful, locally grown, sort of king silver variety of corn, even olive coloring, no discoloration, yellow spots, very firm husk, nice firm to the touch. We will pull some of these ears of the corn. Look at how beautiful this corn is on the interior, nice, beautiful, even gold color, all the kernels are nice and tight and nice and firm.

We don't see any discoloration or any black spots, an absolutely beautiful ear of corn. Let's take another one, let's head to get our other vegetables. We have found our red peppers here. Let's take a look at this one, nice ruby red color, nice tight firm flesh, no pot holes, they are wonderful on the grill. We are going to wrap them, roast them in the oven, slice them, put them in the salad. This pepper should keep about seven days in the crisper section of your refrigerator. I am looking for some scallions and I have found a great bunch of green onions right here, synonymous for scallions and green onions, they are the same vegetable, two different names. I am looking for some that don't have a discoloration, bottoms are nice and firm, no discoloration on the bottom. Nice onion aroma. I like to cut them thin, put them on the top of soup or toss them in the salads. It's a great bunch of scallions. Look at this beautiful basil. This is actually what they call living basil. As you can see it's on its root stems here. You can actually take this basil home, you can actually replant it, I have done it myself, I have grown some beautiful basil plants with this type of product. This is a sweet basil, there is all different kinds of varieties of basil, we have Thai basil, we have Genova basil, spicy basil. This is a nice sweet type of basil. It's going to be wonderful for our dish. Now that we have all of our ingredients, let's go home and get cooking.