Salmon

I made chili for dinner on Saturday, then was stumped as to what to make for Sunday. The Trader Joe's salmon filets in the freezer seemed a likely candidate for protein du jour, but what to do with them?

A quick look through Ming Tsai's cookbook Simply Ming turned up salmon glazed with a soy/kaffir lime concoction. Rather than follow the recipe, which required several cups of both soy sauce and brown sugar, I winged it with about a quarter cup of each, plus orange juice instead of the required lime. And you know I keep a bag of kaffir lime leaves in the freezer...seriously, I do!

I crusted the salmon on one side with sesame seeds and cooked it on our pancake griddle rather than a sauté pan. It came out fairly rare in the center, which means it wasn't overcooked, as usual at Chez Minx. Yay! I made a side dish of rice with onions and mushrooms, and we had a salad as well.

The red stuff is a bit of sriracha, for color.

The meal's flavors were very subtle and on the Japanese side. Like cooked sushi maybe. I have a bit of the sauce left - what should I do with it?

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The Leftover King

Nothing goes wasted in my house. The day before Thanksgiving, we got a delivery order of Peking duck and Chinese broccoli with oyster sauce from Szechuan House. We demolished most of the duck apart from a whole lot of soggy skin. A few days later, Mr Minx crisped up the skin in a hot sauté pan to make duck cracklins, cooked up some onion and mushrooms in the resulting rendered duck fat, added the leftover broccoli, and cooked some fettuccine. The resulting pasta dish didn't taste at all Chinese. But it was delicious.

Szechuan House gave us the carcass, and that's waiting in the freezer for a stock-making opportunity, along with the bones from this year's turkey.

I have a co-worker who "don't do leftovers." I really don't understand that mentality at all. Sometimes I prefer to create something with pre-cooked food, rather than to work from scratch. I made a big pot of chili on Saturday and there's about 1 1/2 quarts of it left. I have a feeling it won't be consumed in its original form when we get around to eating it....

How do you feel about leftovers?