I grew up just outside the market town of Bridport in Dorset, which is right by the coast. Sometimes we'd go to a seafood restaurant called Arthur's in the little harbour town of West Bay. A dear friend of our family was head chef there for many years, and as such, Arthur's was a bit of a local institution, well known for serving excellent seafood. Lobster, crab, langoustine, wonderful fish, oysters and scallops.

My mum would always have a piece of pan fried brill with sorrel sauce and crispy spinach, it was one of Arthur's signature dishes. I would always have grilled scallops in garlic and parsley butter. The dish would come out hissing and spitting as the scallops sizzled ferociously in the hot butter. The smell, I remember it now.

After lunch all the kids would go outside and play. That was almost as much fun as lunch itself, as the restaurant was on stilts of sorts and right on the banks of the River Brit, just before it funnelled its way through the sluice gates and out into the briny harbour. All the scallop shells from the busy kitchen would end up underneath the restaurant, there were literally thousands of them, it became a feature in a way. So, obviously we'd use them as skimmers, flicking them out across the surface of the river.

Sadly, Arthur's closed, but I still love scallops. So, when I get the chance to cook them, it's always a real treat. I'm lucky enough to be able to get hand-dived scallops from a lovely local fisherman in Lyme Regis, who dives for scallops in Lyme Bay, an area where dredging has been banned on the inshore reefs since 2008 to protect the seabed. It's proved a successful project in which scallop numbers have made a great comeback. The meat from hand-dived scallops is always lovely and fresh and sweet, and it's by far the best way to harvest them, in my opinion.

pictured above Scallops with green peppercorns, garlic and cream