I dislike most canned fish. I also don’t love cooked salmon. (Yes, that is practically blasphemy growing up in BC.) But in some well-intentioned yet misguided attempt to eat more ω-3 fatty acids on a budget, I came to own a club pack of canned salmon sometime before the free world went belly up (i.e. pre-Brexit/Trump). I needed a plan to fix this (just the grocery situation, not geopolitics – I ain’t Jared Kushner).
The mission: Make something that I would actually want to, rather than begrudgingly, eat.
The strategy: Play up the umami, play down the mealy-fishiness.
The happy accidents: Finding kaffir lime leaves in the freezer, realizing that the pantry odds and ends (Bonito flakes! Nori sheets! Sesame seeds! And even MSG!) were only a food processor whirl away from being a classic Japanese seasoning, and forgetting to do dishes so the only appropriate cooking vessel was the cast iron skillet.
The output: I don’t have a name for the bastard that is half kaffir-scented yaki onigiri and half furikake-seasoned salmon cakes with a yuzu-mirin-soy dipping sauce. I only know that I ate 2000-calories worth of it in a day.
euniversal appeal 