On visits home to California, I always take at least two food gifts: dried scallops and dried mushrooms. My parents live in Monterey Park, which has a thriving Chinese community, but these ingredients are much cheaper in Hong Kong. Dried scallops, or conpoy, are intensely flavoured and a wonderful addition to soups and congee. The larger dried scallops have more flavour than the smaller ones. Like all Chinese dried ingredients, they need to be soaked to soften them before use. Rinse before soaking in warm water; the soaking liquid has a lot of flavour and can be added to the dish in place of plain water.
Steamed egg custard is a delicious home-style dish that can be flavoured with many different ingredients, such as dried or fresh seafood or finely diced cooked meats. If you're making it with dried scallops, don't use the top-quality whole ones, broken pieces will do. Soak them in warm water and when soft, shred them roughly with your fingers. Break the eggs into a bowl and whisk with salt and ground white pepper. Stir in the soaking liquid - the proportions are equal measures of egg to liquid (if there's not enough soaking liquid, add water). Stir in the dried scallops and pour the mixture into a heat-proof bowl. Boil some water in the bottom half of a two-tiered Chinese steamer and put the dish in the upper half. Lower the heat so the water is simmering, cover and steam until the custard is set. Remove from the steamer, drizzle with soy sauce, scatter with chopped spring onions and fresh coriander and serve immediately.
One banquet dish I love is whole, dried scallops set in a 'jade bracelet' of a round of sze gwa (fuzzy melon). The banquet version is complex and calls for several components. For an easy home-style dish, buy the largest dried scallops available and soak them in warm water along with a few dried mushrooms. Buy fairly small sze gwa, peel off the fuzzy skin and cut into rounds about the same thickness as the dried scallops. Scoop the seeds from the melon and place one scallop inside each round. Place the rings in one layer in a shallow, heat-proof bowl. Discard the hard stems from the mushrooms, julienne the caps and scatter over the melon/scallop rings. Peel smallish garlic cloves and add them whole to the dish. Stir the oyster sauce, soy sauce and finely ground white pepper into the soaking liquid and simmer in a small saucepan. Mix a small amount of cornstarch with water and stir it in - the sauce should be quite thin. Pour this over the melon/scallop rounds and steam for 20-30 minutes until they are cooked.