[Sca-cooks] Happy Passover!

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Hullo, the list!

For those that celebrate it (and I do, sort of, at least in the form 
of attending a Seder at least once every year), may your festival of 
unleavened bread (hello, topic of spiritual significance of bread!) 
be a blessed and happy one, and may we all find the freedom we seek.

As the household hosting the Seder I'm attending aren't conservative, 
I'm bringing the fish. Per the request of my hostess, this will be 
gravlax. She had spoken glibly a few weeks ago of getting hold of 
salmon fillet at one of the local gourmet shops in her area -- lovely 
seafood but ridiculously expensive -- for a mere $14.95 a pound. I 
was shocked by this, and offered to scout out whole salmon or sides 
at any of several Chinese fish markets I shop at, figuring there was 
no way in the world salmon fillet would cost more than $7 or $8 a 
pound, and probably a lot less than that, probably more like 4 or 5 
dollars a pound. We then decided it made no sense for me to locate 
salmon for gravlax and make a separate trip to their house in 
sufficient advance to make gravlax there, the plan morphed into my 
making the gravlax. I spent a two-year period making it in quantity 
about three times a week, so this was nothing new to me.  At the 
first shop I entered, the one that's within walking distance of my 
home, I asked them if they had any whole, unportioned salmon fillet 
(they had single portions of skinless, boneless salmon fillet for 
$4.99/lb. They said. "No!" I asked if they had any whole salmon, and 
if I could buy a side. They said, "...uh, maybe... but if you buy the 
whole fish it'll be cheaper." They brought out a fairly monstrous 
eleven-pound salmon, which they weighed out and announced the whole 
thing would cost me just under $29. They then filleted it for me with 
more skill than I've ever seen before, including picking out the 
little pin bones with tweezers, and sent me home with about eight 
pounds of fillet, beautifully trimmed, scaled and boned, and the 
split head, gills trimmed out, and the bones, in a separate bag.

So I think I got a better deal than $14.95 a pound for fillets. Now 
all we have to do is figure out what to do with over six pounds of 
gravlax.

Anybody else doing the Passover thing, and cooking anything interesting?

Once again, a happy holiday week to all!

Adamantius
-- 




"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la 
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them 
eat cake!"
	-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau, "Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
	-- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry 
Holt, 07/29/04