Thursday 18 October 2012

Salmon: a eulogy

Any Tuesday evening that ends at 2am with two women listening to Edward M Kennedy’s eulogy from his brother Robert’s funeral in 1968 has either gone terribly well or terribly badly depending, quite literally, on your politics.

Sticking with terribly well, although that is not how I felt the following morning, the evening started in the normal fashion with supper.

My flatmates and I had decided to cook this recipe, from the justifiably super-mega-famous blog ‘Dinner: A Love Story’:
http://www.dinneralovestory.com/salmon-for-people-who-are-sick-of-salmon/

We weren’t at all sick of salmon (although you’d think we probably were given that my last post also concerned the softly coral fleshed……..sorry, too Nigella?), but we thought it looked good. I offered to get the food, flatmate (female) got the wine, and we were all set.

(Incidentally, on my way out of Waitrose, I was nearly mown down by a motorcycle driven by a man I dated, briefly, earlier this year. The most unbelievable part of this story is that this is the second time that has happened to me as I left a supermarket (Cambridge, 2007, Sainsbury’s), although at least that first time only involved a pushbike. Given the unbelievably short odds that a person might have been on dates with TWO murderous bipedallers, I was almost tempted to pay the Stupid Tax and buy a lottery ticket.)

Calming my shaken nerves, we got down to cooking which took all of about 15 minutes (or one vodka tonic, in an alternative time keeping method I quite enjoy). It could not have been more simple. We left out the peppers and mushrooms and replaced them with truck loads of chopped up runner beans. We also used a lot less coconut milk, because one of our tins was 2 years out of date, and a lot more jasmine rice, because flatmate (male) didn’t believe 75g was enough per person. We threw lots of fresh coriander, basil and lime juice over the top of everything and it was delicious.

A thoroughly enjoyable evening all round. Well, for me and flatmate (female) at least. I’m not sure flatmate (male) was that enthused to be forced to be my sous-chef, watch Great British Bake Off and then be banished from the kitchen by the force of terrible chat as we summarily sorted out the Global Financial Crisis, pondered how to manage maternity leave and then rounded off the night with some classic American rhetoric.