To really screw things up, it takes a Chef!

Ok, time to get back to the theme of this blog.....which is......what is the theme anyway? Well, it's supposed to be about pastry, food, cheffing, baking, cooking, and bitching about pastry, food, cheffing, baking, and cooking. But I can veer off topic a lot, because it's my blog and I can cry if I want to.

And cry I must. It's not easy to confess my foibles, but I'm full of foibles. If I do not confess them, then I'm truly not an honest person, and if anything this blog is an honest reflection of the crazy person which is me.

My husband and I happen to have this neighbor who is a commercial fisherman. He has his own boat, and runs a fleet in Alaska. The advantage of having this neighbor, is that we end up with a lot of fish in our freezer, mostly because my husband has been lucky enough the past couple of summers to go out with our neighbor on a couple of his fishing trips. He catches a lot of White King Salmon, and if you've never tasted White King, it's a real treat. I think it's even better than Copper River King, but somehow White Kings don't have a good PR person, and I think they want to keep it that way. Fine with me...all the more for us!

Even though I love White King, living here in the Pacific Northwest, you get kind of sick of salmon eventually. I'm sort of on salmon burnout...have been for the past couple years. So suffice it to say, I haven't been real motivated to pull any salmon out of the freezer for a while.

Yesterday, as I was rummaging in my frost-encrusted freezer for dinner, I figured if I didn't pull some salmon out soon, it would be well past it's tasty life and freezer-burned beyond recognition. So, reluctantly I pulled out a large fillet, and said, "Fish for dinner tonight." Sigh.

Even though I have extensive culinary training.....I'm sort of in a fish rut. I really wanted to make my White King Salmon new and different because I was bored with the same old broil, or bake with lemon-butter thing. Whenever I want some great recipes or advice on making a great dish, I turn to my outstanding Chef friend Abra. She may never have gone to culinary school, but she can out-cook almost anybody. She knows almost everything about all sorts of foods and even foods I've never heard of. She had a personal chef business for a while and did well at it, but those damn repetitive stress injuries put an end to that. Boy can I relate! She can put a lot of culinary school chefs to shame....if there's anyone who deserves the title "chef", it's Abra. In fact, if you need help, Abra can assist you too.....just go to the  Chef to the Rescue forum! Just don't swamp her with questions too much, because I need her to help ME.

I emailed her asking if she had any new fun exciting recipes for this fish I was less-than-excited to make. Promptly she emailed me back with some great suggestions. Does this story have a tasty happy ending? No. In fact, just because I'm a chef does NOT mean I do everything perfectly every time. Far from it!  Here is my letter to Abra, describing how my meal went:
 

How was my salmon????
Well.

Let me just say that I might turn my whole attempt at making dinner last night into an entertaining blog entry!

I'm not sure this has ever happened to you, but even with all the cooking experience I have behind me, some days I
ignore all common sense (and the inner voices) in my head and go into complete "DUH" mode. I call it the "power of
the recipe." You know, you're looking at this printed recipe, and you think that because it's there and because it's printed, then it is bulletproof. Somehow you think if you follow all the instructions, despite the obstacles, it will all come out wonderfully.......because it's a recipe.......and you followed (or tried to follow) the instructions. As a baker, I immediately know when I look at a recipe what it's pitfalls might be and I compensate, using my knowledge and experience, and sometimes DESPITE the recipe, I can turn out some pretty good stuff.

Now I must say, I don't have as much confidence in myself when it comes to the savory side, and that stems from not
having as much exclusive experience in it, and because after pastry school, when I went to culinary school, I didn't quite find it as appealing as pastry, and sort of nodded out a few times in class. The day our chef explained the parts of a cow, I was definitely somewhere else.......dreaming of eclairs I guess. I found learning all the mother sauces and sauces really boring and filleting fish was gross, as was trussing poultry. I hated cutting myself all the time learning my knife skills, and working on saute was stressful, hot, and greasy. The hot side did definitely help me decide that my    career path would be in the methodical, precise, not so hurried world of pastry. Culinary school also helped round me out with a general knowledge of the hot side....but did I want to be ensconced it it? Not really. Only in recent years have I rediscovered the joys of the hot side....mostly because I do it at home and don't have to kill myself in a restaurant.

So, to summarize, I doubt myself much more when it comes to savory, and let myself be transfixed by the "power of the recipe". (That's why we'd be such a great culinary team, because you kick my ass on the hot side!).

Sufficiently hypnotized by the words "Salmon Buerre Rouge" (I adore reduced fruity sauces), I set about preparing it.
My first mistake? Choosing Salmon Buerre Rouge. My inner voice said from the get-go that it would not work with White King Salmon. Coho or some other red meat salmon-yes, but not White King. I don't know if you've ever had White King, but it's a very delicately flavored fish.....much like trout. The flesh is BARELY pink....almost white. In fact, most people don't realize they're eating salmon until you tell them. So, does a dark, reduced fruity sauce work with fish like that? No. I knew that....but still.........the fish was thawed, I did not have a back up plan, it was already later in the evening, and I was too lazy to go to the store to buy ingredients to make one of the other recipes you sent (that would have worked out better). So I forged ahead.

Second obstacle......I opened the bottle of red wine I had (the recipe stated I should not use something too tannic, and it was then I realized I had no idea what "tannic" tasted like, so I just hoped for the best. I asked Mark later if he knew what "tannic" tasted like and he said "acidic leather".....that didn't help me much). Of all the bottles of red wine I've opened lately, this wine was a BAD APPLE. It was terrible. Vinegary. Bitter. Yuck! I didn't even want to drink it. So my inner voice said, "don't cook with bad wine." My stupid outer voice which is cheap and lazy said, "might as well cook with it since I can't drink it. All the bitterness will "cook out". Yeah. Sure.

Third obstacle......no shallots. I figured I'd just sub in some onion. You can get away with that sometimes, but with a sauce with so few ingredients, I knew that the subtle flavor nuances of shallots actually counted in this instance. But since my outer cheap lazy voice is such a bully, I subbed in the onion anyway.

Fourth.....a dumbass decision (among the many dumbass decisions I'm making in this trainwreck of a dinner), is that I thought I would sub in a fancy Ginger Fig Balsamic Vinegar in place of red wine vinegar or plain Balsamic. I figured using a fancy vinegar would somehow make up for not using shallots (huh?). My inner self knows that too many flavors can really screw up a sauce, especially if they are flavors that may not work together. When I got to the point of using the Ginger Fig Balsamic, it was like trying to put lipstick on a pig.

Fifth......I had White King Fillets that I knew were way too thick to fry. But the "recipe said" to fry them, so in my stupid hypnotized state I did as I was told.......put a cast iron skillet on medium high heat, poured some olive oil in there, salt and peppered the fillets, and put 'em on the fire. Ok, I only have electric burners, but I like to say "fire" because it makes me sound all professional and stuff, despite what I'm telling you now......!

So 5 minutes go by and I turn them (like the recipe said). Now I'm just waiting for the fish to cook through....which really should be a very short amount of time.....otherwise the fish will dry out. 5 minutes goes by. 10 minutes. The skin is burning on the bottom. I turn down the heat. I cover the skillet in hope that the steam will cook the inside faster. 3 minutes later, the fish is still raw in the middle. I flake a little of the outside of the fish off with a fork and taste it. It's fish flavored wood chips. I knew by the time the inside finally cooked, we'd have the driest fish on the planet. I stuck a spoon in my reduced sauce, which I had added the butter to, to taste it. What do you get when you cook down bad bitter wine for a sauce? Worse bitter sauce. The flavor and the acid assaulted my mouth. At this point I should have just given up, but I don't give up easily. I added a couple pinches of baking soda to take some of the acidity away, and poured in some sugar. The bitterness still prevailed, but the sauce was "almost" edible....which isn't saying much. I quickly covered the skillet with foil and poured in a little water, and stuck it in a 325 degree oven to finish cooking for about 15 minutes.

So I called Mark out for one of the worst meals I've fixed in a long time. I warned him......! He was a sport and gave it a try, and then said, "What the hell happened?"
He tried to salvage his dinner by wiping off the sauce and smothering the fish in tartar sauce, and he choked that down. We agreed it was indeed terrible. As I was going to throw the rest of the fillets in the trash, he said "don't throw them out!" and I said, "God, why? You're not going to eat these!" And he said, "Well save them for a while and if I don't eat them in 3 days, then you can throw them out." And I'm like, "Why.....so I can be tortured by this for a little while longer????" He's a mean mean man.

We're having fried chicken for dinner tonight.