Easy Dry-Cured Salmon

Before refrigerators were a thing, people improvised delicious ways to keep their food fresh, like making sausages, curing bacon and fish, and fermenting vegetables (and sometimes meat!). Now humans are coddled by technology, and there's little need for preserving food the ways that we used to. Our refrigerators and smart phones have made us complacent eaters (I'm writing this on my iPhone) and as a result, we have settled for frost-bitten frozen pizzas and a boob tube sesh after a hard day at work.

A few years ago, I started curing salmon in the fridge with the easy method listed below. Although I'd like to find an alternative for plastic wrap (to avoid the xenoestrogens in plastic), I'm just mentally too lazy to find a better method. See what being pampered by technology does?

According to my research on Wikipedia, a dry cure without sugar is called a London cure. This is the kind I prefer, because sugar seems to be in just about everything else. Follow the steps below for tasty, dry-cured fish that keeps for a few weeks in your refrigerator.

You will need:

• 1 side of salmon or lake trout
• 1-2 T grated lemon
• 1/8 cup sea salt
• 1 T fennel or black pepper to taste 
• Pliers
• Plastic wrap
• A pan to catch the water that is pulled out of the fish during curing

Rinse and pat the fish dry

De-bone fish with pliers.

Rub the mixture onto both sides, but especially the  side without skin.

Wrap it in cling wrap and lay the fish in a pan.

Put it refrigerator, flipping once a day for 5 days.

Unrwap, rinse off mixture, pat dry with a towel, then slice on the diagonal.

Hot Cocoa do-over

My favorite thing about cold weather is hot chocolate. Every time I go outside, the crisp fall air nips at my face and hands like a friendly-but-not-so-friendly dog, reminding me that my hands need to be wrapped around a warm mug of sweet, rich chocolate and my face needs to be perched above the steam rising from my personal cauldron of liquid contentment. To most people, it means buying a bigger Christmas sweater and loosening your belt as you prepared to get Starbucked right in the bum by a sugary beverage of convenience.

But all that sugar just isn't good for you, and cocoa is easy to make. That's why I modified the recipe. If the Swiss miss drank as much low-grade by-the-packet cocoa as we are led to believe, she would not be on the cover of a cocoa box. So this year tell Swiss Miss and her friend the siren from Starbucks to suck it, and let's do this cocoa thing right.

2 tbsp. xylitol 

2 tbsp. Cocoa powder

12-14 oz flax/almond/coconut milk

Put the xylitol and cocoa in a pot together and turn the heat on medium. Add a splash of milk and continue stirring. Add a little more milk after a minute and continue stirring. Keep doing that till all the milk is in the pot. When steam starts to rise off your cocoa, it is time to turn off the heat and pour into mugs. Makes enough to for 2.

All the measurements are approximate, so you may have to adjust them a little.

In case you don't know, xylitol is a naturally occurring sugar alcohol found in plants, and even in fruit. It has been used in Scandinavia as a sweetener for years, and is very common in the rest of Europe. Don't let that fool you into eating it by the bag, though, xylitol has a laxative effect (Google sugar-free Haribo gummy bears Amazon review for a wonderfully-written description of one man's experience).

5 years ago, I posted a different recipe on my blog that used nonfat milk and agave nectar. Since then, I've learned that cow milk is something that most people are sensitive to, and that nonfat dairy is just a bad idea for so many reasons. Also in the last 5 years research has emerged that shows agave nectar working in the same way as high-fructose corn syrup in the body, so that's is interesting.

The world of nutrition is constantly changing, and I love looking through old blog posts and recipes to see how much has changed about the way my family cooks, eats and lives.