A recipe with a supposed marinade

Because mastering life skills can be challenging, some of us never took Home Economics in school, and Seamless abounds, cooking has found itself in a category of activities considered hard. But "Easy if you have the right ingredients" is more of how I approach it. That phrase is certainly a good way to describe making things of all kinds that you've never attempted before, and probably a less daunting way to approach them.

I didn't coin that phrase though. As you'll see from the email exchange below, "easy if you have the right ingredients" were the accidentally sage words of my father, and for better and for worse, the phrase has never been truer than it is today.

In attempting to make Salmon ala Harry Levy for the first time since the first and last time I made it a decade ago, I came back to something that has become a running theme of this experiment: I didn't remember any specifics about cooking it before, and the instructions I had in Fave Recipes were incomplete. Only the first half, the part that outlines how to make the marinade, was in the document; the second half, with instructions on how to cook the salmon, was missing. Not that the second half is particularly informative. Like, "Use marinade as a sauce" -- what does that mean? That I should marinate the fish in the cooked-down sauce, and then cook the fish and pour the marinade over the fish when I'm ready to serve? But then the cooked marinade might heat up the raw fish before it's actually seared. And how much salmon should I use with this particular amount of marinade-sauce combo? These recipes seem to stir up more questions than they answer.

I could have emailed the actual Harry to see if he still cooked it and what he thought. But as is also a theme, that would have been asking for help instead of muddling through on my own. Instead, I decided to marinate some defrosted salmon I got during a binge at the Whole Foods 365 in the uncooked sauce. Of course, was the sauce totally accurate? No! I thought I had mirin and didn't, so replaced it with some white wine and sugar. Then I marinated the fish in the sauce with the scallions for about 15 minutes, while prepping some white rice (apologies if this is all starting to feel a little too familiar) and an edamame recipe I've been wanting to try. I generally only make edamame one way -- boiling it and covering it in salt -- and isn't that pretty boring. Did I follow that edamame recipe to a T? No! The dried chiles de árbol were skipped, and I accidentally peeled the garlic instead of leaving it in its shell.

The fish was then removed from the marinade and cooked, and when it was done I fast-boiled the marinade to make the sauce (you can do this and it's safe!). Was this "correct" at all? Seems like it must not have been, though I did consult a few similar recipes for comparison's sake. It was certainly in the right ballpark. And the result was actually really tasty in that weeknight dinner kind of way -- sweet but not too sweet, and a great sauce to pour over the rice. (I'll note that my dining companion said the rice was surprisingly good, though I have literally no idea why, considering I didn't even use broth to cook it.)

I've been trying to figure out what's so funny about a lot of these recipes, and what they bring out in me, and I think I've boiled it down to a lack of diligence. So much of food media is about attaining a fantastic, perfect meal, one that will visually dazzle the senses. But a lot of what's in here is making something that doesn't require hours of prep or beg for presentation. It's very present-based. It's not pure laziness that prompts me to approach most of these recipes with a more "I'm going to make one of these tonight and see what happens" attitude than an aggressive, deeply researched one. Even when I do the latter, I often don't feel pressed to do more than amble about and figure out a way to make it as easily as possible. These recipes don't bring out an obsessive personality who is trying to climb a mountain and prove she got there, but someone who wants to wander down a mostly flat but nice-looking hiking trail. Obviously, because would an obsessive use an ancient iPad to take extremely subpar photos of their dinner? No!

KATE

P.S. W/r/t last time around, Madonna hits us with some wisdom that definitely relates to this week's topic: "One thing I know about chili; everyone thinks his/hers is the best."