Food and Crafts for All Occasions

Salmon Roasted under a Grainy Dijon, Soy Sauce and Mayo Glaze

This recipe is a guaranteed crowd pleaser. Everybody raves about it. Even my most picky gourmet friends find it amazing, despite the use of such an unpopular ingredient among foodies as mayonnaise. I learned this recipe many years ago from my mom-in-law and since then it was one of my favorite salmon preparations.

Copper River Sockey, Roasted in Cedar Wraps

Hello guys! If you are fans of wild salmon, I’m super happy to announce to you that it is Copper River salmon season now, yay! It’s still on a pricey side, but it should become cheaper soon. It’s always like this with seasonal products, you know.

Homemade Lox or Salt-n-Sugar Cured Salmon

Homemade lox is Ilya’s favorite snack. A piece of dark bread and several slices of the salmon and he is happy as a clam. For a weekend lunch, I cut croissants in half, spread some light whipped cream cheese on them (chèvre works great too!), top with thin avocado slices, some capers and, finally, with the lox. You  can eat the sandwich as is, open faced, or bring the halves together to form a tall closed one.

For a party, the cured salmon goes well with small rye toasts and sides of horseradish and sour cream or crème fraiche.

The good news about homemade lox is that it's surprisingly easy to make. It takes less than two days to cure it and almost zero effort. You can take any kind of wild salmon: king, sockeye, silver, whichever is available in a store.

Smoked Salmon Pâté

Remember our homemade smoked salmon I posted about here? Here’s how you can turn it into quite delectable pâté, so fast and easy to make it took more time for me to type this recipe than to actually make it.

Our Ideal Saturday

For food crazies like us, ideal Saturday means lots of good cooking and good eating. This is how our last Saturday went.

Starting breakfast: Fruit salad with non-fat organic vanilla yogurt and crunchy granola with oats, puffed rice and pumpkin seeds.

After a pretty quick farmer's market shopping for morels (hurray! they are 25$ per pound now) and garlic spears, we returned home and started to smoke the spicy Andouille sausages we stuffed the day before.

While they were smoking,we had sandwiches with home-smoked salmon, Persian cucumbers, sour cream and horseradish, all on a Russian rye bread:

And after I made two batches of strawberry jam, one with lavender and another one with chocolate.

The sausages are ready:

And so are the jams:

Despite snacking on the jams and sausages (you have to taste what you cook, right?), we still had some room  left for light dinner:

And some after dinner cooking, just cannot stop yet. Morels were halved, soaked, washed, sauteed and put into the fridge.

If we're going to have more morels this year, I'll freeze them (sauteed) so we can enjoy them in winter too.

Green Egg Smoked Salmon

Several years ago Ilya and I had a gas grill and an electric smoker and thought we enjoyed grilling and smoking very much.  However, after we bought us a Green Egg, we finally understood what real grilling and smoking is all about. Even pizza in it cooks within 2 minutes and tastes like the one from a real wood oven.

Poached Salmon with Pernod, Fennel, Fresh Garbanzo Beans and Cream

To my taste, poaching is one of the best ways to cook salmon. When served together with poaching liquid, this salmon is referred to salmon a la nage. Despite its French name and seeming haute cuisine-ness, my dish is so simple and fast to make that you can easily cook it for a weekday dinner.

Traditionally, poaching is quite a long process. First, a poaching liquid, called court bouillon, is cooked. Then an item to be poached is fully submerged in it and left there on a low heat until done. Before or during poaching, some portion of the poaching liquid is taken out and turned into a sauce by mixing it with other ingredients and reducing to a proper consistency. Looks like a whole project, isn't it? That's why so many people either never bother themselves with poaching or do it only for special occasions.