Spicy Cedar Plank Salmon

Joel surprised me tonight and brought home a whole coho salmon. What can I say – he knows what I like. (a quick side-note - a couple times a year when salmon is in season and the grocery stores have good prices on fresh wild salmon we’ll buy a whole fish to filet out into individual meal sizes, vacuum seal, and freeze for a later date.)

Living in Seattle we have the opportunity (privilege?) of eating delicious fresh seafood all year long. Even with all the seafood we eat, we have pretty simple tastes and normally make things the same way every time.  Steamed clams, steamed crab, shrimp with lemon and garlic, salmon on a cedar plank…while I love to cook, we aren’t about to take risks with our precious seafood. 

Tonight I decided to take a small risk with our salmon and tried a new recipe (of course I wasn’t stepping too far out of the box, because we still grilled it on a cedar plank and one of the main ingredients was brown sugar). It was definitely a risk worth taking – I would highly recommend trying Real Simple’s Cedar Plank Salmon.  Sweet, with a surprise spicy bite – Joel and I agree this recipe is a keeper!  Easy ingredients – thyme, cayenne, brown-sugar and of course salmon, and while the recipe said to grill it for 40 minutes, since we didn’t grill up a full 2 pounds of salmon – we just grilled up 2 portions worth – it only took about 10 minutes of grill time.

I forgot to take my own picture – but here is the Real Simple picture – DELICIOUS!

Playing Dress-Up

We’ve done a substantial amount of work to the inside of our house, but unfortunately over the past (almost) 5 years that we’ve been in this house we’ve neglected the poor outside.  We did upgrade the paint job, but other than that we’ve let nature take its course..literally…blackberries completely overtook the backyard, in fact, if you only saw the backyard you would have thought that the house had been vacant for twenty years…This summer we’ve been putting a lot of work into the outside of the house. More posts will come, but we rebuilt the backyard fence, pulled out all of the blackberry bushes, created a little patio off the side of the driveway (okay, really more of a parking spot for the bbq), and laid down some bark. 

The outside is definitely coming together, and is leaps and bounds better looking than it was 4 months again, but really still needs some help. 

Here it is now…well almost now – a couple weekends ago we replaced the window on the left, but I’ll post about that later.

I’ve been playing a little photoshop dress-up tonight.

Cedar shingles on the upper front triangle of the house

Re-roofing (our current roof is nearing the end of its life) in a darker shade

and now for the chimney…stucco

or maybe some faux river rock…ooo…pretty….

I’m not sure we’re digging the cedar shingles, but I do think the front face of the house needs something to add a little personality…any ideas?