High Hopes

This is going to be a quickie update because it is the wee early hours of Sunday morning. (ACK! it's 4 am!) I should be trying to get some sleep, but I am not a normal person and so I tend to let things like curing salmon keep me from my 40 winks. I managed to leave the salmon alone for 30 hours! This was no small task, but much of that time was spent away from home so that the temptation to constantly peek was not too bad. Thanks to Tom for dragging me away from the fridge long enough to enjoy a gorgeous Saturday outside. Wooo did I need to be outside and in warm weather, it's been a looooooooong winter.

The picture above is the salmon just after I removed it if from the plastic wrap, but before I rinsed off all the curing junk. I thought it looked pretty like this. I wasn't so confident when I first removed the weights though, as a matter of fact it didn't look good to me at all. With very little expectation and muttering under my breath about wasting food and money, I carefully unwrapped it from the plastic, even though it was still covered in curing stuff, it didn't look THAT BAD. I felt an inkling of hope. I scraped away all the curing stuff with my hands (it's fun AND gross) and once I saw that it looked fine, maybe even looked like it was supposed to...well...then it took everything I had not to burst into the bedroom and wake Tom to show him. Instead, I rinsed off the curing stuff and patted it dry with paper towels then rubbed it down with sunflower oil and sprinkled it with black pepper like the recipe told me to. I should have added more dill at this point, but I'm clean out, and forgot to pick some up while we were out, but no worries, I'll do it later. I re-wrapped the whole lot in plastic wrap and put it back into the fridge until I'm ready to use it much later today. I didn't taste it, although I wanted to, but I had just brushed my teeth and decided the two tastes wouldn't go well together.

I have exciting plans for this salmon, some of which includes taking a good bit of it over to Mom and Nonna because 3.5 pounds of salmon, (as much as we love it) is way too much for us.

To be continued....

Written by Deb on April 13, 2003 04:01 AM