Although I always loved the taste of salmon steaks growing up, it was many years before I ever tried cooking them myself. You see, when I went to college and taught myself to cook, I knew my natural limits pretty well. First of all, I was not brought up learning how to cook at a young age. I knew nothing that I didn’t teach myself, and I didn’t take the time to teach myself much. I liked to cook chicken and beef because they were easy and always turned out pretty well. With something like salmon steak, however, it could be much more of a hit or miss affair. Salmon recipes call for precision. If you cooked them for too long, they would get tough and robbery. If you did not keep them moist enough, they would be practically inedible. If you didn’t cook them enough, they would be dangerous. It was so hard to tell, and I was too intimidated to try.
Then I met Meredith. The thing about Meredith was that she loved fish more than anything. She was from New England, and she was raised on fish. Her grandfather had actually been a fisherman! She wanted me to cook her some wild Alaskan salmon, and you know how young love is. I couldn’t refuse her anything, even if I had no idea how to do it. I looked at all the salmon recipes I could find, picked the simplest one, and got to work.
The recipe called for barbecuing the salmon steaks, something that I assumed would be easy. I had the same natural delusion that most guys have: that something about my Y-chromosome enabled me to grill flawlessly, even with very little experience at the art. I should have known better. At first, I couldn’t get the salmon steak to grill at all. Then, the fire flared up too high. By the time I was done, one of the salmon steaks was practically ruined and the other one was only marginally better.
You should have seen how sweet she was about the whole thing. There is nothing so humiliating for a guy as to fail at barbecuing something, yet to see her eat them, you would think that I had done the salmon steaks perfectly! Best of all, she offered to cook next time. She showed me how to bake a salmon steak, and soon I was cooking like a pro!
Tags: salmon steaks