Higher I.Q.s Courtesy of Mr. Jason

I have mentioned before that the grocery store version of any kind of food sucks if you've ever had that food when it's been grown, raised, or caught straight from nature. We had another startling example of this last night when we ate some salmon.

Now.  I am not a fish fan.  I eat the fish A. catches, and it's okay, but I don't go wild for fish like some people do.  My previous experience with salmon has been, in a word, gross.  The fishy smell and flavor are absolutely appalling to me.  So when Mr. Jason returned from his annual two-week Alaskan salmon fishing expedition and presented us with ten pounds of salmon fillets he had caught and processed himself, I was apprehensive.

For one thing, ten pounds of Sockeye and Silver salmon is worth about two hundred dollars at market prices.  So I really didn't want to screw up cooking it.  For another, it was incredibly nice of him to give some to us and I really wanted to like it.

So I put my faith in my belief that most food only sucks when it's from agri-business and cooked a few pounds of Sockeye salmon last night.  The color is shockingly red when raw and is quite amazingly pink when cooked.  I broiled it plain last night, just so we could really taste the flavor.

The verdict:  Yeah, it's just grocery store salmon that sucks.  This fish had slightly more of a fish flavor than the white-fleshed trout and pike A. catches in our lake, but it was certainly nothing disgusting.  Cubby ate an enormous portion because, unlike me, he's all about the fish.  Good for his brain and all, I guess.  Everyone else was appropriately impressed with it as well.

So the moral of this story is that if you want to eat really good salmon, you need to have a friend who goes salmon fishing in Alaska every summer and then presents you with wild salmon straight from an Alaskan river.  Start hunting for that friend now.  You can't have Mr. Jason; we've called dibs.