TGIF.  Thank God It’s Friday.  A long week, and now the beginning of the Memorial Day weekend.  So, what to do.  Camping?  Happy hour?  For Eric and Jethro, how about some cooking? Scott sadly had another engagement to attend.

There’s no specific agendas to our meet ups anymore.  Sometimes we watch food documentaries or go to restaurants.  This time, we just wanted to cook something and eat the thing.  We bandied about some ideas via text and started thinking about salmon wrapped in pork skin and deep fried.  The conversation continued:

With the idea of blueberry puttanesca, I grabbed some blueberries and olives and headed over to Eric’s place.  From there, the idea transformed.  How about seared salmon with a blueberry gelee?  We began to create components.

Taking our plating inspiration from a dish found on the Internet, we created our first go around.  Seared Copper River salmon with blueberry gelee, snap pea emulsion, cherry coulis, toasted almond dust, microgreens and edible flowers.

With a little salt and this dish was awesome.  But it was just the first iteration.  Eric vacuum sealed some leeks from his garden with butter and threw them in the water bath.  We pulled out another dish and considered our options.  Let’s go vertical as well as horizontal.  Let’s evoke a nautilus spiral to contrast with the straight edges of the dish and salmon cubes. With tweezers, squeeze bags and tongs in hand, we made another go at it.

Awesome.  The addition of butter poached leeks and whole blueberries gave the plate better flavor and a really cool presentation.

The best part?  It was all done at home in a small kitchen with an old electric stove.  Like a bluesman once said, it’s not the guitar, but how you play it.

Jethro