1 Fish, 2 Fish, Steamed Fish, Fried Fish (6/29/11 - 6/30/11)

For almost a year now, Julie has been raving about her dad's maple plank salmon, sometimes done with fish fresh from Pike's Place market in Seattle and hand-carried on a plane to be eaten at home. For just as long, I have been raving about the steamed fish my mom prepares. In its best form, she steams a white fish, then pours oil, garlic, ginger, and soy sauce over the top for a very traditional Chinese steamed fish. So fish was bound to happen.

It was bound to happen in spite of my current diet (note that I said it was "loose" before) and that I can't remember having ever prepared fish before. Since Julie was equally untrained, we decided that we might develop our fish cooking skills on cheaper fish before really being able to enjoy good cuts. At the beginning of the week, we picked up frozen sockeye fillets at Trader Joe's with plans to use them later on.

I forgot to take pictures of the first effort, but since we had nothing in mind for the salmon, I asked my mom for her recipe for preparing salmon in my favorite style. I can remember as far back as 3rd grade, one of my mom's standard dinner recipes was tin-foil Chinese salmon. In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense since it's pretty easy to prepare, and there's no reason to get fancy when you have a kid like me who loves it.

Tin-Foil Chinese salmon
~8oz salmon fillet (the weight isn't too important; just cook more or less)
1 or 2 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 small hunk of ginger, minced
2 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp oil (veggie works fine)

1. Preheat oven to 400F. (my mom always used the toaster oven)
2. Wash the salmon fillet and pat dry so that it isn't so fishy. Place in a piece of tin foil large enough to wrap it.
3. Spread the garlic and ginger over the top of the salmon. Pour the soy sauce and oil over that.
4. Take the long ends of the tin foil, pull them together ("hot-dog style"), then roll together the ends to seal. Roll up both of the far ends so that it's a complete seal. Place into another pan or sheet.
5. Stick it in the oven for 10-14 minutes, or until you can "smell the garlic".
6. Pull it out, let it sit, then transfer the tin foil over to another plate, and unwrap. Serve with steamed (white) rice and steamed veggies.

Thinking over the recipe now, it really is exactly the same recipe as for a legit Chinese steamed fish, except with the tin foil as an easier method of preparation. Unfortunately, I was unaware of how dark sockeye is, and without much experience cooking salmon, I stuck it back into the oven twice, thinking it was still too pink. The result was a little chewy, but otherwise the exact deliciousness that reminds me of possibly the second most regular dinner I ate growing up, next to Chinese stir-fry. And given how much I like it, I think it's probably the meal from which I have derived the most total enjoyment in my life. Paired with some cooked spinach and carrots and white rice, the meal came together quite nicely.


So Wednesday, scheduled as "salmon" on the whiteboard on my fridge, went well enough, and since Thursday had no label and the package came with 2 fillets, our destiny was pretty set. Having already done a steamed fish, we wanted to do something very different. While watching a New York Times video about baking pizza from one of my new favorite internet video stars, Melissa Clark, I saw a link for salmon from Mark Bittman, the Minimalist, on a simple pan-fry method. We mimicked his method as best we could from my pantry and got a simple dry rub put together from cumin, paprika, and fresh cilantro.

Fried as directed, it went pretty quickly, with the major snafu being that when I flipped, the rub had already burned a bit. The final result was good: the salmon was cooked pretty much perfectly, and the flavor of the dry rub came together pretty well from our haphazard substitutes.

There were a few lessons, though. First, paprika burns fast: this site seems to confirm my suspicion about what happened. I'm not quite sure how I would've gotten around that, other than perhaps to flip sooner. Even so, I could still taste the paprika lightly, and the aroma was great. Second, the fresh cilantro didn't do much. In its fresh form, it probably would've worked better as a garnish.

I'm super-psyched about this particular recipe, however, as I think it'll be a great learning tool. The cooking method is reliable and a good skill to have. The real magic, however, comes in the customizability of the rub, and trying different things will help us figure out what spices matter. A tip Julie got about learning to cook was to try food before and after adding ingredients to see what the effect is. What's nice about this rub is that we can get 2-3 stages of a rub by applying it at different mix-in points for ingredients, with several strips to compare bite-by-bite.

The big lesson this time was about cumin: cumin is really good. I have used it in various cooking before, but just as part of a recipe. This time, the simple rub and its resistance to the pan-frying process made its flavor very strong, which I liked.

Julie enjoyed the salmon-cooked spinach-rice mix/pairing so much, we decided to do it again. To try something different again, though, Julie sauteed the spinach with some onions and garlic, and it was a very nice complete to the salmon. It was a very simple meal with some pretty nice results and a good look at how the same base of ingredients (salmon, spinach, and rice) can turn out vastly different meals by changing the spices and preparation method.