Salmon Cakes

I've been making these salmon cakes lately that really impress my roommates. "How did you make that so fast?" they ask. Answer being either "I'm a kitchen genius" or "they're stupidly easy." Pick one.

The basic recipe requires:
1 can of salmon
1 egg
1/4 cup of breadcrumps (approx)
butter
vegetable oil

(Also pictured below is a variation on spaghetti with fried eggs that I've been making a lot lately too, for similar reasons.)

Beat the egg. Mix it up with the salmon and the breadcrumbs in a small bowl. You really just need enough breadcrumbs to get it to hold together into a cake when you shape it with your hands. I've discovered that if it's still fairly round when I put it into the pan and I try to press it flat it often cracks and comes apart a bit but it's still perfectly edible.

Fry the cake(s, since there's no reason you can't make more than one at the same time, if you have a big enough pan) in a mixture of half butter, half vegetable oil for a few minutes, until it starts to brown, then flip it and brown the other side. And you're done.



I usually also add:
dash of dried dill
1/4 onion, chopped and sauteed

The first time I made it I didn't have dill so I used ground clove instead, which was interesting. Tasty, but I use clove enough in other things that I don't feel the need to repeat the experiment.

This recipe is fairly eye-balled because I got it from my mom, who got it from her grandmother, who adapted it from something called "salmon loaf" that I've never personally been exposed to. I brought it with me to college because it's so fast, it's tasty, a cheap way to eat salmon, and I can make it out of things I pretty much always have around anyway. Along with frozen peas, it's my go-to "I don't feel like going to the grocery store today after all" dinner.

Key Lime Bars

So my mom made this thing, this delicious key lime pie thing. She made it for the first time a couple of weeks ago for a Margaritaville party, and because we still had a number of the ingredients left over (and because it was awesome) she made it again for our 4th of July get together. The filling is a really nice mix of creamy and fluffy--I've had key lime at restaurants since then that I didn't think was as good, it was too smooth and kind of custardy--and it's got a neat citrus bite to it that goes well with the butter in the crust.

Our version breaks down like this:
1 cup finely ground graham cracker crumbs
2 1/2 tablespoons finely ground graham cracker crumbs
1/3 cup sugar
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
3 large egg yolks
1 1/2 teaspoons dried lemon peel
2/3 cup fresh Key lime juice
1 cup sweetened condensed milk, (14 ounces)
1/4 cup heavy cream

You'll notice that this is slightly different than the list in the original recipe. My mom is of the opinion that zesting is entirely too much trouble, so we used dried lemon peel instead. It's perfectly tasty. Sometime I want to try this recipe with fresh lime zest proper, but this version has plenty of zing to it, so I'm not complaining. We also didn't use the key lime slices in the presentation, because we're not quite that awesome.

We also used two ingredient tricks to make it easier to prepare. The first is store-bought graham cracker crumbs. This was mostly because my mom made so many of them for the party; if she'd just been making this for home consumption, she would have just gotten graham crackers and taken a rolling pin to them while they were still in the wax-paper package.

The other is Nellie & Joe's Famous Key West Lime Juice. Again, this was mostly necessary because my mom was making these in mass quantity for the party, and juicing 60+ key limes (they're tiny!) would have been ridiculous. But even for smaller batches, it's not a bad trick. The lime juicing would be the most time consuming part of this recipe. Without that, it takes a minute or two to mix up the crust, you can prep the filling while that's baking, and then after another ten minutes in the oven you can stick the whole thing in the fridge and forget about it until it's ready to serve. That last step is a big part of what makes this good for parties: it's really best if you make it a day ahead of when you plan to serve it.