Nothing like a good salmon steak. I grew up on salmon. My dad, who was born and raised on San Juan island (north Puget Sound), learned how to cook salmon from his grandfather, who learned how to cook it from the Indians (Sorry! Native Americans.). Unadorned. No gourmet spices, no sauces (maybe a little dollop of tartar sauce on the side), none of the tricking up that some chefs do nowadays. Just the salmon itself. Dad said that when you were oven-broiling it (having set the steaks on a piece of oiled butcher paper on top of the grill), there is a period of about ten seconds when the steak is perfect. Less than that and it's not quite cooked through. More than that and it would start to dry out. Dad's timing was perfect.

Why did I start this? I'm drooling all over my keyboard!!

Anyway, salmon used to be really inexpensive around here. The salmon and the geoduck (a large, slightly obscene-looking clam—spelled "geoduck," but pronounced "gooey-duck") were indigenous foods around the Pacific Northwest. But now, because of over-fishing and other ecological chains of events (such as clear-cut logging, which removed the trees that slurped up the water that now runs off and silts up the rivers where salmon used to breed; the silt buries the eggs and the fingerlings don't hatch), the North Pacific salmon is an endangered species. You pay as much now for a salmon steak as you'd pay for filet mignon. Didn't used to be that way.

And fish-farm grown salmon are nowhere near as flavorful as wild salmon.

Fish fingers. That's where all this started. Fish fingers. But, whatever rings your chimes. You have my sympathy. (Sigh)

Don Firth