Monday, September 19, 2011.
Poaching Salmon For An Unappreciative Audience.
Mary Ann was so happy with the tri-tip we cooked last night that she asked me to cook again tonight. At The Fresh Market--the best place to buy premium foods on the North Shore, with prices to match--she found a slab of king salmon. She called home to check on it. Is it marked as coming from the Pacific? I asked. (Yes.) Tell me its vital statistics. (Pound and a half, skin on, three inches thick in the middle, not a tail portion.) Good. Get it.
"Why don't you poach it?" she asked when she got home. I like poached fish if it's a fish with a lot of intrinsic flavor, as salmon is. Besides, poached fish = thick robe of hollandaise. I love hollandaise.
I should have objected, though, because this was too big a wonk of fish to poach effectively. Indeed, when I thought it was done I cut in and saw that it was far rarer than Mary Ann would consider. It was in the pan for over twenty minutes, much longer than I've ever poached a fish fillet before.
Even before she tasted it, Mary Ann was disappointed. "I like fish crusty and crunchy," she said. I told her that poaching was not the method for achieving that state. "I like it grilled," she said. Then why didn't she ask me to grill it?
In the extra time it took to poach the fish, I took the hollandaise one step beyond and made it a bearnaise, with a little bit of Creole mustard added as an experiment. The mustard wasn't a bad touch, nor was it an improvement. I did come up with a better way to cook down the flavoring herbs in the wine: instead of doing it on top of the stove, as I've done for thirty years, I microwaved it. Much better and certainly quicker.
The bearnaise more than made up for the lack of crustiness for me. "I thought I liked salmon," Mary Ann said. "But I don't think I do. Not this way." I suggested that she try some bearnaise. She did. "That's it!" she said. "The time I liked poached salmon it had bearnaise on it. I guess that what I really liked was the bearnaise!" I will note that for future adventures in the kitchen.
We were having a lovely evening. Even, I thought, a romantic one. Then she said something about how Obama thinks that we're wealthy and that our taxes would go up to support his socialist agenda. I pointed out that if our taxes went up everything else would get better, because nobody's paying enough taxes right now.
And that was the end of that.
It has been over three years since a day was missed in the Dining Diary. To browse through all of the entries since 2008, go here.
