A Salmon Dish That's Simple Perfection
A simple Japanese salmon dish
A no-recipe recipe for blistered eggplant with goat cheese
Plus, Yotam Ottolenghi's five-star blueberry, lemon and almond cake
Good morning. You can love your life and still fantasize about another. I'm lounging under Northeastern black walnut trees in the manner of a king, eating corn and clams and tomatoes and scup, the sky pink and blue, everything perfect in the slightest breeze. Still, my imagination soars: I could be in the middle of an endless Alaska day of netting salmon and picking cloudberries, and wouldn't that be nice?
It sent me to the market, to the glistening slabs of king salmon over ice, a summertime splurge for a New Yorker with wanderlust. What I want to cook: chan chan yaki (above), a miso-butter salmon of rare distinction, Japanese in flavor and execution, exactly what I'd make if I were camping in Homer, down on the Spit.
'Chan chan' is onomatopoeiac: the sound of two metal spatulas chopping and mixing vegetables and fish on a griddle. But Marc Matsumoto's recipe, adapted by our Mia Leimkuhler, requires no such gymnastics: You chop cabbage, onions and carrots in advance of the cooking, sauté them in a skillet, and then put the salmon, daubed with miso butter, on top of them to steam until it has just cooked through. It's simple perfection, excellent with rice cut through with crumbled, dried seaweed and an ice-cold beer.
Won't you join me this weekend in making that, wherever you stay?
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Other things I'd like to cook in the next couple of days: the navy bean soup that's been on the menu at the United States Senate Dining Room for more than 100 years; this blueberry, almond and lemon cake; some vegan mapo tofu.
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