Smoked Salmon

Let me state right here that I don't like to cook. However, over the last year I have become a relatively competent cook. More and more, if I want to eat and if Mark wants to eat, it is up to me to put meals together. So for Valentine's Day I got Mark a new cookbook from America's Test Kitchen. It's his favorite cooking show and he loves their books. Yesterday I tried out one of the recipes, it was for salmon. Oven roasted salmon, and I made a nice grapefruit and shallot relish to put on top of the salmon. One problem is the tiny print in books these days. For some reason the print in books keeps getting smaller and smaller, and this new cookbook was no different. Tiny little print. So I took the book and scanned it on my printer, then blew it up big enough for me to read. In fact you could now read it from across the street, so it was perfect. I followed the instructions and the relish turned out great. The salmon was another story. The book said to turn the oven up to five hundred degrees. Then put the salmon on an aluminum baking sheet, stick it in the oven, and turn the oven down to two hundred and seventy five degrees. At four hundred and fifty degrees smoke started to come from the oven. By the time the oven got up to five hundred degrees smoke was pouring out of the vent at the rear of the stove. As the kitchen filled with smoke and the smoke alarm began beeping, I fumbled with the salmon and dropped it upside down on the aluminum baking sheet. Much cursing ensued. I opened the kitchen window and the bathroom window for cross ventilation. This allowed my neighbors to enjoy my cursing and helped ventilate the smoke from the kitchen. After baking the fish for the prescribed amount of time, I pulled it out of the oven and stuck a thermometer in it. Eighty degrees internal temperature. Not good for oven roasted salmon, not good for sushi. So with more cursing and threats to throw it all into the garbage, Mark told me to just cook the salmon the way I always did. Three hundred and seventy five degrees, for nine minutes. It turned out perfect.