Running Afoul of the Nutrional Nazis

Our supermarket had frozen WILD coho salmon on sale.  If you read this blog you know I'm crazy about wild salmon and dubious about farmed. 

I browsed through my recipes to see what I had, because grilling season is over here in Massachusetts.  We don't have the right set up for outdoor cooking in winter.

"Salmon with the taste of the fjiord" popped into view with a recipe for Russian potato salad.  Looked good, and I had everything except beets, dill and well, salmon. 

The recipe was yellow with age, maybe from the New York Times. by Marion Burros, whose name I recognized. 

So:  first the potato salad.  I had some nice fingerling potatoes and we bought some gorgeous organic beets.  The recipe also called for chopped apple (yum) and the dressing was sour cream, vinegar, horseradish, and seasonings.  After everything was cooked and together I took a taste.  Sour as lemon.  Then, I noticed there was no mayo.  No salt either, so I added those things and re-tasted.  A winner!

On to the salmon cakes.  I grilled the salmon indoors and one of the cats came to investigate.  Go away, kitty.  Since it wasn't shrimp, she did.  Everything was fine with the cakes, which had dill, capers (rinsed) red onion, rye bread crumbs and more horseradish.  Everything was fine until I tried to make cakes out of the salmon.  It continued to fall apart and this was not good.  The recipe called one one egg white.  I added a second and that didn't work either so I added the yolk as well.  Moderate success.  Fried them up and we sat down to eat.  Very tasty.

Then I realized that the lack of egg york, salt, and the recommendation for low fat sour cream which I ignored sounded like a recipe you maybe wouldn't want to try.  Even the New York Times fell for this back in the 80's when Molly O'Neil waved the flag for low-fat food for a while.  Then she went for ethnic food with 24 ingredients per recipe and I stopped reading the Sunday food column.  Alas, Craig Claiborne, where were you then?

 I tried to recall if Burros had been on a low-fat, low-salt, low-anything-that-tastes-good regime.  Maybe.

So the salmon cakes were good, if tricky to produce in one piece, and with the addition of whole egg.  

I'll probably make the potato salad again with salt and mayo.  On the whole, a good meal. With some doctoring.