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. 

Farmed or Wild: I'll Walk On the Wlld Side

First I'd better tell you that I grew up eating really fresh fish, fish that someone caught hours before we ate it.  My experience with trout was that I would go fishing in the Colorado Rockies with my parents, who fished with flies.  They would catch rainbows or German Browns, and put them into a grass-lined creel,  (the old-fashioned wicker kind) .  In late afternoon we would hike back to the cabin or wherever we were staying, and my dad would whack the fish on the head, clean them and start a fire.  I think he lit wood over some rocks.  When the fire was hot, he would heat a large black cast iron skillet over the fire, and then dip the fish into a mixture of flour and corn meal.  Some sort of fat was put into the skillet, maybe lard or bacon grease, maybe Spry or Crisco, and the fish would be fried up for dinner. 
This nearly ruined me forever for eating "restuarant" fish, but that's another story.  The important thing here is the fish were fresh and caught in the wild.  They tasted beyond fabulous.  You can't imagine how good they tasted.

We lived in Chicago for many years, and some restaurants had a Friday night fish fry, which was usually acceptable,  but for serious seafood,  you had to eat at the Cape Cod Room at the Drake Hotel and damn, the fish was wonderful but the prices were high. 

When we moved to Boston, we discovered Legal Sea Food, in fact I worked above their Kendal Square location for many years.  Always good fish.  We also bought it from Cap'n Marden in Wellesley to cook at home and that was also tasty, too.  I like seafood plain, like my Dad cooked the trout. Not gussied up with fruit or dairy products or Chinese spices or anything weird.  Preferably not served over pasta.  Fried potatoes or French fries, yes; coleslaw, yes. 

Now we come to the crux of the matter, that being salmon.  There are those who will tell you they can't tell the difference between farmed and wild salmon and my answer to that is that they have ruined their palates with bad food, processed food, overly sweet food and junk food and cheap Chardonnay.  Farmed salmon is sort of mushy, full of dye, and has an off-taste all it's own.  Wild salmon is beautiful, naturally red and tastes fresh and wonderful, and clean, just like a fish should taste.  We only ate wild salmon three times this summer because it cost a fortune, but boy, was it good. We grilled it with nothing but salt, pepper and olive oil.

I was horrified and appalled when Legal Seafood at the Harborside had farmed salmon on the menu.  "It's from Norway," said the server.  "It's good."  Well, it still had that "down on the farm" flavor and I didn't like it.  So I'm a salmon snob.  So be it.  

Farmed salmon is not as good as fresh.  I wouldn't eat anything full of dyes and antibiotics (sea lice, anyone?) for health.  Nope.  Better just scarf down a fish oil

capsule everyday.

Otherwise, go for a walk on the wild side.