OMG. What a fierce cooking lesson. We prepared salmon in 5 ways. The first was a salad of "lox" and fennel. It was wonderful. First, however, we started out by filleting the 20 pound salmon. The fatty pieces were cut off, a salmon steak was cut off and the scrappy pieces were saved for the salmon and pasta dish. Then we prepared the curing of 1/2 of the salmon. It was so big that it was going to take 4 days to cure (so for our recipe
we used some that he had prepared earlier). The salad was easy to prepare, all we did was cut the green parts off of the fennel, then sliced the fennel (minus the root) very thin. Then prepared an olive oil and lemon juice and salt dressing, whipping it with a fork until it was creamy. Rinsed the fennel and let it sit in the dressing for 10 minutes. Piled the carpacchio on top, dressed the plate and ate. It was more than delicious.
The next dish was pasta with salmon, using the trimmings from the salmon. The we did a wild, fancy dish with the raw salmon rolled around a mixture of bread, shrimp, artichoke hearts, olive oil, garlic and fish stock that was boiled for 15 minutes, then ground into a paste.
We had sliced the salmon into two layers and gently pounded both layers flat. Then rolled the paste inside and baked it in a 400 degree oven for 15 minutes. Very tasty.Then we fixed the salmon filet with green peppercorns, brandy and fish stock. It was divine. Then we prepared baccala (which has the texture of halibut) with a tomato sauce. Yummy.
And the finale was a seafood risotto that was easy and tasted like the ocean ... it had clams, shrimp, calamari and mussels along with calarose rice with fish stock.I am exhausted. He kept pouring glasses of wine to go with each course, so I stumbled home. If you want to see more detailed pictures go here.
