Hey Look What I Found

Can you believe my husband was hoarding wine given to us by friends?! My, my, my. You live with someone for so long and they STILL surprise you. Nancy and Bob gave us this wine which we cannot wait to open… probably next Friday for our tradish happy hour:

Beaujolais Nouveau French Wine

Then Rock and Jackie gave us TWO bottles of this wine. They gave us 2 with the stipulation that we drink one and if it’s really good, we share the other with them. It is a Lebanese wine:

Chateau Ksara Reserve Du Couvent

So if it’s REALLY good, I say we tell them it wasn’t great and drink the other bottle ourselves! Hope they don’t read this blog.

While I was thinking of what to do about dinner, I was feeling snacky. Now in my mind, there is something safer to snack when it’s broken rather than whole, so this is what I found from the bag of the yummy honey pretzel rods left from the other day:

On to dinner… we are having salmon. You will most likely cringe when you read the ingred. to my marinade but I was feeling a chocolate craving and, as I always believe…go with it:

.75 lb salmon fillets
2 tsp black cherry concentrate (doesn’t chocolate go with black cherry????!!)
1/2 tsp minced garlic*
2 TBS lemon juice
1 TBS cocoa powder
1 tsp brown sugar
1/4 tsp ground cloves (I actually wanted cardemom powder but I didn’t have any so I thought what else strikes me as going with chocolate?… clove!)

Spread olive oil in bottom of pan and preheat oven to hi broil, shelf set about 4 inches from burners. Let salmon sit in marinade for about 30 minutes and broil 4 min per side, skin side up first. When I turned the salmon over, I added 1/2 tsp each fillet, dried cherries.

I served this with cauliflower sauteed with leftover chopped green beans. Just boiled cauli. til softened, approx. 10 min. Drain and add chopped beans to pan, salt and pepper to taste, saute abut 8 min.

*Just to let you know if you didn’t know already, if a recipe says “1 tsp garlic, minced” that is a different measurement than ” 1 tsp minced garlic”. The first means to take 1 tsp of garlic and mince it. The second means to MINCE garlic to make 1 tsp. …get the difference?

Here is the salmon which turned out WONDERFUL!