Haha Dinner FAIL!!!!

After I decided this weekend that I wanted to add more deliciousness to my repetoire, I thought I should start "experimenting." I have made (and "blogged" about making) my fair share of chicken and flank steak, so I thought it was time for some fish. Usually shrimp would be my go-to seafood since I KNOW those and know them pretty well, but unfortunately BP has crushed that hope and dream, at least for the summer (dear BP: get my beloved gulf coast cleaned up ASAP before I get to NOLA this fall...side note Marcie and Rachel yall should come with- Columbus Day weekend check your calendars!).

When I realized I didn't want to mess around with Chinese shrimp (where they are coming from now) or attempt to explain crawfish (freshwater) yet, I thought I could get in the mood for some salmon. Now, I don't even really like salmon (I thought) but I have had it a couple of times in the past year and enjoyed it. So, since it had been on my mind I decided to do a test run. I got myself all sorts of pumped up about it, especially since work has been crazy for me lately and I have essentially been chained to my desk populating excel spreadsheets (the enemy) until our investors meeting this Thursday. Needless to say, I like to take little breaks throughout the day and think about what I am going to do when I leave the office, like make dinner.

Coincidentally Cathryn (my sister/roommate/bff 99% of the time) also had a hankering to try something new, so we made the trek up to Whole Foods (she tried to make us walk, but we "compromised" and drove since I hate exercising). Once at Whole Foods, I got a 1lb salmon filet (Alaskan wild), a bunch of Swiss Chard (leafy vegetable), a bunch of scallions, some ginger, garlic, sesame oil, and some rice. The marinade I wanted to do consisted of ginger, honey, lemon zest, sesame oil, scallions, soy sauce and garlic. It is actually an awesome marinade that I usually use for shrimp and thought would transfer over to salmon nicely. I got the swiss chard as a vegetable because it is a little crunchier than spinach (my fave...seriously) so I thought would be a nice accompaniment to the somewhat asian tasting salmon. After that the rice was an obvious choice.

Cathryn was making a porkchop recipe from her new Top Chef cookbook, so as soon as she had all of her ingredients we checked out and went home to start our marinades.

Obviously the first thing I did was make a batch of nachos (I know, I know, but we were starving and her bf wasn't going to be there for another hour to do the grill) so we needed a snack. Next, I put the salmon in a ziploc bag (or you can put it in a dish/bowl) and added about: (I don't usually measure unless I'm baking so these are estimates) 1/3 cup of soy sauce, 1/4 cup of sesame oil, 1/4 cup of olive oil, 3 scallions (chopped), 3 chopped cloves of garlic, 3 tbs of honey, 2 tbs grated fresh ginger, and zest of one lemon (zest=grated rind...has more flavor than the juice). I reserved about 1 tbs each of the ginger and the lemon zest to use with the swiss chard. Then I put it in the fridge to sit until grill time when we (Greg) put that and CM's porkchops on.

Next, I rinsed and chopped the swiss chard, put it in a big pan with 1 tbs olive oil, 1 tbs sesame oil, and the reserved lemon zest and ginger.

Then I put the rice on the stove to cook.


While all of this was going on, Cathryn realized that the risotto she was trying to revive after being in the freezer was NOT coming back to life. We both tasted it and agreed that our mom had been right, it would NOT freeze and reheat well. As we were throwing that out, talking about how lucky it was that I had made enough rice for everyone, the smoke detector started going off. We couldn't figure out what was burning so badly until I took the lid off of the rice (which I still don't know how I screwed up...talk about having too many things going on at once). It was literally a block of blackened rice that was smoking and completely stuck to the bottom of the pan. We both just started laughing so hard we were practically crying at the fact we had both just totally mangled our side dishes, but decided to just throw some uncle Ben's rice in the microwave. At this point, both Teddy (my dog) and Greg (Cathryn's bf) had escaped to the man kitchen outside to get out of the way and put the meat and fish on the grill. The next thing I know, while Cathryn and I are inside cooking the spinach and swiss chard (sautee just like you would spinach until it is wilted), Greg shouts inside asking if we have a fire extinguisher. No, we don't, and I have been saying we needed to move the grill AWAY from the house for about two months now.

As I walk outside towards the (literally) 8 ft high flames, it is apparent that Greg didn't know Cathryn's marinade consisted of mainly olive oil (her's was different than mine), and in his sweet, kind, thoughtful wish not to waste any of it, he drizzled it over her porkchops and directly onto the open flame. It caught everything inside the grill on fire and once I stopped laughing at the situation, I tried to explain to Cathryn that it would all burn off, just had to give it a minute. Greg looked at me with that "ahhhhhh what do I do now??" look, and Cathryn was jumping up and down and fixing to grab the cooler top to "smother" it (note, that would NOT have worked as oil fires catch onto anything they touch and she would have then been running around the yard with a flaming cooler top). Right after I pulled the grill away from the house (that house is the love of my life and I was not about to have it smoke stained, or, even worse burned to the ground), the bottom of it fell out and that's when I started to get a tiny bit worried. Cathryn ran inside to get some baking soda (the next best thing to a fire extinguisher for an oil fire). Once she came back out, the fire had pretty much burned itself out so we decided to just close the grill lid and leave it be for a while.

Interestingly enough, her porckhops had gotten fully cooked in the process, but Teddy got to eat them all since they tasted like smoke. Fortunately, the salmon had not been put on the grill yet so I put it in the broiler for about 15 mins (if I were to do it again I would have put it in the oven on 350 for about 20 mins, wrapped in a tin foil pouch. Regardless the marinade and fish were very good. The swiss chard and Cathryn's spinach were fine (didn't taste her spinach but the chard was tasty) and thankfully the rice was OK. So, instead of having two completely separate meals, we ended up all having some salmon, some greens, and some rice. I would definitely make the salmon and the swiss chard again and serve it with rice. I bet Cathryn will try the porkchop recipe again if she's not too mad at it and I will definitely post that recipe because it looked awesome.

Aside from almost burning the house down, we all had a good long laugh about how badly each one of us screwed some part of this dinner up and that made it all completely worth it. At the end of the day, we could have called Pizza Movers and we would have still had a great time just being together! I do think Teddy really appreciated the porkchops as well.

Moral of this story: It's just a meal, and what do you have left if you can't laugh about the mishaps?? I am so fortunate to have a life and a kitchen full of friends and family that can find humor in all of the crazy things that make life interesting. As my friend Thalia pointed out after I emailed the picture above to our email chain: "I enjoy blackened salmon dm. Sell it as a new culinary technique!"


Love and Happy Hostessing!