Last night’s dinner was a salmon pie, I guess. I don’t really know what to call this. Salmon en croute? When I told John I was planning on making salmon en croute, he responded “who’s croute?” and unfortunately it made me laugh.
Wow, was I scared of this meal. A few weeks ago I watched a video of longtime bae Jamie Oliver making a pie just like this, and I loved it. Naturally I didn’t bother rewatching the video (or engage in that old timey thing called reading) before diving in.
To make the greens mixture, I cooked down two bunches of spinach, one bunch of watercress, along with half a sliced onion and a few sliced garlic cloves. I was also down to the ends of a bunch of parsley and dill, so I washed the stems really well, and chopped them up finely, which resulted in almost 2 more cups of stuff! After it all wilted, I let the mixture cool in my salad spinner while it drained, and then I squeezed it more with paper towels, and tossed it in a bowl.
To the bowl, I added 2 eggs, lemon zest, some nutmeg, and a hefty chunk of this nice Bulgarian cheese that’s essentially feta, just softer, creamier, and less tangy.
I also intended to add some par cooked rice here, hoping the rice would finish cooking in the oven by absorbing juices from everything else, and eliminating moisture that could make the puff pastry get soggy. Instead of partially cooking, however, I ended up boiling the rice to near doneness, destroying my prospects at ever doing anything right in this life. As we say in showbiz: whatever.
My rolled out puff pastry was waiting in the freezer, so I added the cooled greens mixture and thought about how much my digestive system was going to love me for all this fiber and butter.
I cut a salmon filet into two inarguably equal pieces, plunked them on top, seasoned with salt and pepper, and hastily folded it all together like a present wrapped by your 4-year-old niece, if your niece only had one hand.
Oven strategy felt important here: I had it preheated at 425 for a while so it was very hot. I put the pie on a rack toward the top, because my heat source is at the bottom, and I didn’t want to burn the bottom of the pastry before the salmon was cooked. A few minutes in, after some anxious pacing, I turned the oven up to 450 for some reason. The goal was to get the pastry to puff up and get golden before the salmon cooked all the way through.
A lot of things could have gone wrong here (soggy pastry, burnt pastry, dry salmon, raw salmon). In the end, the salmon was cooked all the way though, when I would have liked it to be ~just~ cooked, or even medium. And the rice was a little bloated because I cooked it too much in the front end. The pastry bottom was perfectly crisp, however, and it was super tasty, especially with a squeeze of lemon, so John and I exchanged several nods and smiles while we ate.
I almost didn’t even write that previous sentence before moving on to the next paragraph, which speaks to my fixation on things that don’t work out perfectly, rather than looking at the glass half full: the fact that I have an entire fucking salmon pie for dinner.
I don’t think I do a good job of making myself more likable when I pick apart cooking minutiae and go on existential benders in these posts, so I’ll hold back. It’s fun to try new things, insert cliche about mistakes as teachers, blah blah.
In the non-mistakes department are these chicken tender salads I made for dinner one night last week (buffalo cobb), then lunch the next day (ginger peanut).
I recently read about a new-to-me way of dredging, in which the whole egg in the middle step is replaced with an egg white whisked with some cornstarch. So that, combined with a fancy brand of panko I bought recently, made the crispiest cronchiest tender I’ve ever had. Never doing it any other way again.
I also almost wrote a post last week entitled “a pair of breasts” because I cooked duck breasts for dinner one night, and had, a few days prior, dry brined and slow roasted a turkey breast, and it was so incredible I nearly cried. I thought it’d be fun to write a themed post about breasts, but now, pen to paper, it doesn’t sound that great.
I wish I could end this post with what we had for dessert last night, but I’m frantically scanning my memory and realizing no dessert activity occurred, not even Nightstand Drawer Chocolate. Instead here’s a picture of when I dropped a nearly full glass jar of cinnamon in my sink, which really sucked.
Your answer to John should be "I am croute", ofc