Saturday, May 15, 2010

Cooking with Ryan: Smothered Salmon

Don't worry, this isn't going to be a recipe thing. I am teaching myself how to cook, and I think I'm just incompetent enough that it should be fun for everyone. Every time I have a break, I take the time to look up a recipe, buy necessary ingredients, then cook it on the last day of the break, which is great if it's one of those casserole type dishes, because I can take the leftovers to work. It's great.
Anyways, like I said, I figured I would tell you about it when I try a new dish. Not so much how t make it, but the story behind the cooking of it. Nobody should ever take my advice when it comes to cooking.
This week, when I went about selecting my dish for the week, I came up with something called black and white bean smothered salmon. It had a lot of fancy ingredients, like red wine vinegar and cilantro, and of course, salmon.I have never actually had salmon before, and I've never been inclined to try it, simply because I think fish is bland, and I'm not a fan of the texture (happy fishing opener!). Salmon, in particular, has been a sticky issue, because of a food poisoning incident involving my parents. Naturally, I was terrified.
I spent a lot of time this past week online looking up broiling, techniques on  broiling, how to know when your salmon is done. Seriously, whenever I had a free moment, I was online, looking up salmon. It's consumed my life, almost as much as the Twins.
The smothering was pretty much a pico de gallo, with tomatoes, green peppers, beans, onions, garlic and some oil and vinegar. I'm pretty ambivalent to tomatoes and green peppers, though the rest of it sounded pretty good. My knife skills suck, so all the veggies were cut pretty big, which continues to be a problem. Also, I learned exactly what cilantro is!
Anyways, it came down to the salmon. The recipe didn't call for a marinade or rub, but I applied salt anyways. Still worried about it having problems, I made sure to broil that fish longer than I probably needed to. I had never cooked fish before, of course. I also had no idea what broiling was until now. After the fish was done, I had the pico de gallo (that's what I'm calling it) all ready to go, threw some grapes along with it. This is how it looked:

Well, it's a few hours later, and the fish hasn't killed me. So far. I was glad the salt was added (woo hoo, personal liberties) because I found the salmon to be rather bland. I also thought my knife skills got in the way, because there was too much green pepper and giant chunks of onion. It wasn't bad, certainly, and I think I could improve it next time, but it really wasn't that great. The grapes were good though.

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1 Comments:

Blogger Rachel said...

Vegetable choppers are wonderful. So are bottled marinades.

9:59 PM  

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