Tonight’s dinner was roasted salmon, steamed carrots, and rice, all tossed with a sweet, savory, vinegary, spicy sauce and assaulted with large quantities of cilantro.
This dish is as direct a replica as I could make of an old Marley Spoon recipe by my genius former colleague Eliza. Some dishes just stick with you over years and years, and this is one of them.
I made the rice myself for once, so it was actually seasoned properly with salt this time (sorry John I love you).
I cooked the salmon in the air fryer, easy peasy.
I steamed the carrots in a way that would shock most people, unless you’ve worked in a restaurant, in which case you have access to the magical sorcery that is the knowledge that plastic wrap can go in the microwave. I’ve recently come to terms with the fact that steaming vegetables might be my favorite preparation. Their moisture and flavor is retained, they become bright and beautiful, they’re kind of soft, kind of crunchy. And the microwave is the best and fastest place to achieve that. Cover a dish of carrots with plastic wrap, bing bang boom 4 minutes they’re done.
It’s possible I’m consuming some kind of dangerous carcinogens from microwaving plastic wrap directly onto my food? But I also eat things like Doritos on occasion, so I’m not really too worried. That above picture is of broccoli I made last week via the same carcinogenic method to illustrate my technique, not the carrots I made tonight.
For the sauce, in a small skillet I dumped some soy sauce, sesame oil, brown sugar, sambal, white vinegar, and half a packet of what is essentially ramen broth concentrate. For a photoshoot once, the client had ordered these ramen noodle kits but just needed the noodles, so I took the sauce packets home, which are basically congealed umami, and whip them out on occasions like this. I poured most of the sauce into a smol bowl to serve on the side, and tossed the steamed carrots in the rest of it to make them all glazed and amazing.
By the time we sat down to eat, we had already drank 1.5 Manhattans each, at my mom’s prescription. Earlier today, I had the most obnoxious anxiety-related episode, feeling stressed about decorating the guest room in our apartment - it had previously been occupied by a friend who recently moved out, and for the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about Everything Everywhere All At Once with regard to furniture I can afford, furniture I want, paint and fabric colors clashing, the terrifying prison that is choosing the wrong 8x10 rug, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. It’s such a wealthy white lady problem to have, and I’m only half white and New York Lower Middle Class, so I literally closed the door to the bedroom and had a cocktail like my mommy told me to do when she called me to talk me off a ledge.
All of this to say that our dinner conversation was all over the place, as it usually is when we’ve had more than 1 cocktail. John had an entertaining laugh attack when we broached the January 6th hearings, and he brought up the part about Giuliani being drunk, and Giuliani defending himself by saying he just drinks Diet Pepsi. We bonded over the fact that we think horoscopes are total bullshit, and discussed the nature of our political differences. John astutely pointed out that it’s less about our differing opinions on politics, but more about our opposite attitudes (impassioned vs. apathetic, I’ll let you figure out who is who).
When I serve us both plates of dinner, I always leave a few bites behind as a treat for cleanup time - it’s long enough after dinner has finished that the meal we just ate has become exciting again. Because it was so cute, I captured my post-dinner share that John came over and served me while he was putting everything away.
For dessert I had John make me a dessert cocktail consisting of vodka, kahlua, Mr. Black, and a splash of milk (the heavy cream went bad). It’s extremely delicious and I just finished my second. There will probably be a third.