So I bought a bag of salmon from Costco. Wild-caught, free-swimming, Pacific-happy, Monty-approved Salmon. But I don't know how to prepare salmon. My fall-back before has always been the following easy steps:
1. Douse in fresh, real, lemon juice
2. Stir in some fresh garlic
3. Marinade and bake.
I might have added basil once. With potatoes. And everything tasted so fishy I had to throw out the leftover potatoes. I guess we did have salmon burgers once, but I bought them pre-burgered.
Well, with this bag of opportunity sitting in front of me (my response to the need for protein in my diet), I hit the net, searching for "salmon" recipes. Deciding to give the Food Network a try, I clicked on their first link:
Maple-glazed salmon with Pineapple Salsa. I had had glazed salmon in restaurants before and never been very impressed except one time in Olympia (where the fish are equally fresh and happy), but for some reason decided I wanted to try one on my own. So when pressed for a meal idea for a guest I decided to give it a try (because guests are only good excuses to try new recipes on, fail or succeed).
I ended up making my own teriyaki sauce with
this recipe, because I don't particularly like teriyaki sauce and didn't want to buy a big bottle of it I then wouldn't use. I figured I liked all the ingredients in this recipe so the sauce couldn't turn out too bad. With the assistance of my teriyaki-loving roommate I ended up adding some sesame seed oil and some rice wine vinegar to even the flavor out, but it turned out pretty good! I didn't thicken it since I wanted to use it for a marinade, so left out the cornstarch steps and put it in an old restaurant-style soy sauce glass container.
I also left the jalapenos out of the salsa because, well, I don't like jalapenos and where on earth would I find pickled ones anyway? So with a significantly altered recipe all around, I took my three salmon fillets out of the freezer this morning and threw them in a ziploc with the marinade and headed to school. I came back this afternoon and retrieved them, poked the fillets with a fork and laid them in a baking dish with the marinade. But then I got to reconsidering how I wanted to prepare the salmon. I didn't have a coal grill as the recipe demands, and I didn't really want to bake, so I looked at some of the Food Network's other salmon recipes and decided to try a searing technique. Initially this seemed like a disastrous decision as the salmon certainly 'seared' with deep burnt patterns all over. The oil was madly spattering and the salmon was cooking at different rates and I finally pulled them out before they could completely charcoal.
I heaped up salsa on the salmon and then laid a fresh pineapple ring on top of that, placed some steamed broccoli on the side, and served it up. I was terrified to take a bite, but when I did, it was pure bliss. The salmon flaked more beautifully than it ever had before when I'd made it. The flavors of the marinade permeated each bite. In all, I considered it a resounding conquest. A culinary feat. A day to smile.
