salmon – The Kitchen Illiterate

Pasta Salad with Salmon, Cabbage, and Carrots

Last week, I broke out the grill for the first time in a year and cooked up some lovely salmon fillets. Being as I was only making dinner for one, I ended up with more grilled salmon than I could eat in one night, and the next day I used the rest to put together a huge bowl of this lovely pasta salad. Well, it ended up being more pasta salad than I could eat in one night, and I had pasta salad to last me many days. And I got a little sick of it after it became my fourth lunch in a row, so I might recommend that if you make this pasta salad, you have more than one person around to eat it. Because I do think you should make this pasta salad. It’s pasta salad season, after all, and this one is unique.
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Grilled Salmon and Potato Salad

Last summer, when I packed up my stuff in Boston and moved it all out to Walla Walla, I brought along the mystery grill. The grill showed up a few years back, on a rainy Fourth of July, but for whatever reason was never even unpacked from the box. It first saw the light of day in Walla Walla, when I used it to cook the first meal I made in my new house. I intended to use it often last summer, but instead, I found myself intimidated by it, and uninterested in spending the time and energy required to start a fire when I was cooking for myself alone.

The grill is a tiny thing, a little Smokey Joe. And last week I decided to get over my fear of fire-starting, pull it out of the shed, and give it back its rightful place on my porch. And despite the freezer full of beef waiting to be eaten, I once again decided to cook some salmon on my little grill.
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Grilled Salmon Livornese

Whew. It has been awhile. The move across the country put a longer hold on my blogging than I expected, but I’m here, in Walla Walla, WA, and getting settled in quite nicely. I’m more homesick for Boston than I ever thought I would be, but am quickly finding that Walla Walla ain’t a bad place to be, even though the whole town does shut down at 10 on weekends. The Farmers Market today played a pretty big part in convincing me I might be just fine here, and if you come back later this week you’ll find out what I’m planning to do with my bounty. Today is also the Walla Walla Sweet Onion Festival, but I have to admit I haven’t bought any sweet onions yet, largely because I only saw them for sale in five, ten, or fifty pound bags, and frankly, I do not need that many onions.

What I’m going to tell you about today has nothing to do with Walla Walla, really, other than that this was the first meal I cooked in my new house, and on my new grill. Daddy-o kindly showed me how to light a charcoal grill, and hopefully I won’t be too afraid to do it on my own in the future, because this grilled salmon was pretty spectacular and I definitely would like to do it at again.
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