Sometime towards the end of the semester my friend Ellen was raving to me about this fish she had with a walnut-maple syrup glaze, and ever since I’ve been looking for a good opportunity to try something like that out for myself. So when Tzega was coming over for dinner it seemed like the perfect occasion. I went to market and got two Atlantic salmon cuts, and proceeded to the grocery store for mushrooms, garlic, zucchini and couple of avocados for a salad (also some snacks for the poker game that was to ensue later in the evening).
Now I had never really inquired of Ellen as to how the fish or the glaze had been prepared, nor did I know how well the stronger flavor of the salmon would blend with the other flavors, nor did I have much experience with fish, or sauces, or glazes or whatever. So basically, I was just winging it. I like to pretend I have all this culinary know-how, but really, I just like food.
I got home and put some brown rice on and preheated the oven to about 375˚ because that seemed like a nice temperature. I diced a little garlic, cut up the mushrooms and zucchini, cracked open a bunch the walnuts we had sitting in the fridge drawer- but pretty much I was just trying to buy some time before I actually had to make a decision about anything I wasn’t sure about.
So first for the fish, I buttered a dish, tossed the two pieces of fish in there, salted it, peppered it, threw some dill and some diced garlic on top, and finally stuck in a couple lemon wedges in there before I covered it with tin foil and put it in the oven. Even though I wasn’t really sure about cooking technique, I knew what it would look like when it was cooked through, so I wasn’t too worried.
But now it was time for the sauce, Tzega had showed up and was putting together a little salad, with some lettuce we rescued from the back of the fridge, the avocados, a little cut orange, and some of the walnuts (I was thinking back to how nice the avocado citrus salad was at Dmitri’s). But really there was nothing else for it, so I tossed a bunch of butter into the frying pan because you can’t really go wrong with butter. Then in went the mushrooms, diced garlic and walnuts. This seemed like a good start, but it needed more body, so I grabbed the Tupperware that had the beef my dad had made a couple days ago. You know how when meat juices cool you get that jelly? Well I tossed in a couple spoonfuls of that. I wasn’t to sure about things, but with a splash of heavy cream, a generous drizzle of good organic maple syrup and a nice squeeze of lemon somehow it looked like it might be alright.
When I tasted this concoction, it was pretty much an awesome blend of flavor and texture: the lemon juice balanced and complimented the maple syrup, just as the walnuts did the mushrooms. And with the zucchini steamed, it was just about time to eat- after about ten minutes, I had uncovered the fish and after another five it looked nicely done. Our two plates looked pretty incredible with a generous pile of brown rice, long light green slices of steamed zucchini and the mushroom, maple-syrup, and walnut experiment over a big piece of salmon, and a little avocado citrus salad of our own just waiting for us to make a little room.
While this meal was a huge success, it got me thinking about the nature of my cooking style. Basically I don’t really know what I’m doing so I probably end up guessing about how to get an effect I’ve experienced when there’s a simple time-tested method. I really could have used a little more body to that mushroom walnut business, but it’s a lot more exciting to just try things out rather than follow a recipe meticulously, and how exciting will it be if I actually guess at that conventional technique one of these days? So who really cares if I what I want is already figured out when it’s fun to go about figuring things out. So I’ll keep improvising in my kitchen, and I may just end up inventing a better wheel some day!
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