Hey friends! Thanks for joining me on week two of my adventure with cooking! I hope you enjoyed last week’s recipe. This week, I really wanted to step up my game. After all, I only have one month to learn how to cook so I need to get it right. I decided to cook fish, because I’ve never cooked it before and it just seems like an impressive dish to know how to make.

So I texted my mom (the best cook I know) and told her I was going to try cooking salmon. Her response was “Let me know how it goes, I’ve never been able to cook it right at home, so I gave up.” And immediately I thought, “Oh. No. If my own mother can’t even cook salmon right I have no hope.” But because this is supposed to be a challenge (and also I am a tiny bit very competitive) I decided to go for it anyway.

After looking up a few recipes, I saw one one that was immediately mouthwatering and didn’t require 10 spices I’m not going to spend money on. Seriously, I dare you not to drool at this: Browned Butter Honey Garlic Salmon. Just go look at the recipe for the beautiful magazine-worthy images alone – after you finish reading my post that is.

Step 1: Cut the skin off the fish and get slightly grossed out, yet stay strong when your husband offers to cut it for you. Forget to take picture with all the ingredients before skinning said fish, which is now not pretty enough for the picture. Take the picture anyway because recipes without pictures just aren’t fun.

Step 2: Brown 2 tablespoons of butter for about three minutes, then add 1 frozen garlic cube (I’m telling you those things are the best), 2 tablespoons of honey, and 1/2 tablespoon of lemon juice. Cook the sauce for about a minute, then save half of it. At this point I realized I should have made more sauce, because there’s never enough browned butter honey garlic sauce.

Step 3: Sear the salmon steaks in the delicious butter sauce for 3-4 minutes. Flip each steak and transfer to baking dish. It really helps if it has foil so it catches all the juice and makes clean up later easier. That’s my own tip for free. You’re welcome.

This is also when I realized – Oh shoot I forgot the rice! Thank the Lord for rice cookers because somehow I’m also terrible at cooking rice. Don’t ask me how.

Step 4: The recipe says grill/broil on medium-high heat for 6 minutes. I preheated my oven on normal broil, because there is not a “medium-high broil” setting on my oven and I’m not an experienced enough cook to know what the heck is the equivalent in normal oven settings. I did not realize that normal broil is the highest setting you can go on an oven and therefore feels like 700 degrees when you open it! I may or may not have set off the fire alarm and got an “I-always-tell-you-to-turn-the-fan-on-why-don’t-you-listen-to-me” look from Matt. #Ideservedit #butyourewelcomeforsalmon

Before I do pros and cons, here is a picture of the end result!

Pros:

• As I mentioned before, this sauce was SO GOOD.
• It was fairly easy to make and used a lot of ingredients I had on hand.

Cons

• Due to my broiling ignorance, the salmon was a little overcooked
• I wish I made double of the sauce.
• The half of the sauce I saved hardened and caramelized due to the honey and even though I heated it up, it was still too sticky to pour over the salmon.

Although the salmon wasn’t perfect it was still yummy and I think I would try it again! If any of you make it and have any tips, let me know using my contact form. See you next week!