Today’s dish holds a special place in my memories, even if it isn’t something my family ever made.

My family used to go on Caribbean cruises often, and I remember these trips fondly. The festive atmosphere kept the emotional abuse to a minimum, the sights and sounds kept it exciting, and the sun and water made sure this was the height of summer fun. The part of the experience I have always held dearest, though, was the fact that mobile phones were non-functional on the ocean, and the boat was enormous. It was a family vacation, but I could disappear whenever I wanted, for as long as I wanted, and they would never find me. As a young transfeminine egg still very slowly hatching, being able to sunbathe without onlookers was valuable to me; as an autistic woman with very particular ideas about how I spend my time, being able to duck out of public life to read, drink, or exercise was important…and all of that is to say nothing of late-night dance parties and evening-long one-time trysts. The cruise ship, a floating hotel of hedonistic delight, was a place where I was free both from the responsibilities that waited for me back home, and from the people against whom I had to constantly be on guard everywhere else.

There was one cruise in which I woke up uncharacteristically late and hungover after a long, fun night, and sauntered into the earliest part of the lunch shift in the ship’s dining hall. My family wasn’t around, and I was seated with a group of strangers. The conversation was amiable enough, but what I remember was my late breakfast: salmon almondine. After the first bite of this decadent French dish, I was determined to bring this totally new and unfamiliar experience into my mainstream.

It’s been years since then, and after several failed attempts, I’ve finally done it.

Salmon almondine is emphatically not Hispanic food. Almonds are found natively throughout the Mediterranean and grown in Spain, but are curiously not a common part of Latin American cooking, and the Atlantic salmon genus Salmo has no representatives in the Caribbean or Southern Hemisphere. So, this is a French treat that has not yet become common in or adapted to Latin American possibilities. More’s the pity—it’s wonderful.

My salmon almondine (amandine in French and non-American English) is presented here purely as a protein preparation. Serve with rice, carrots, or another carbohydrate of choice and a salad. The recipe presented here serves four.

Equipment

You will need a broiler or similar source of intense top-down heat, an oven tray, a flat surface on which to work, two small mixing bowls, a whisk or fork for mixing, and a silicone or other soft brush for brushing sauce onto meat.

Ingredients

• Salmon fillets, skin on, 1 lb. The skin adds soft, creamy richness to the fish. Substitute other fish with a similar flavor profile, such as trout.
• Soy sauce, 1 tablespoon
• Honey, 2 teaspoons
• Smoked paprika, ½ teaspoon
• Salt, ½ teaspoon. Sea or kosher salt is best.
• Black pepper, ½ teaspoon
• Rosemary, ½ teaspoon
• Slivered almonds, ¼ cup
• Lemon slices, four

Common Food Restrictions

• Gluten-Free: For a gluten-free variation, substitute tamari sauce for soy sauce.
• Ketogenic / Low-Carb: This recipe contains no high-carbohydrate ingredients and is ideal for a low-carb diet. Choose accompaniments accordingly.
• Low-FODMAP: Substitute tamari sauce for soy sauce to remove gluten. Otherwise, this dish should be quite gentle on low-FODMAP eaters, since the use of soy is limited and all other ingredients are safe. Choose accompaniments accordingly.
• Vegetarian/Vegan: Fish is the centerpiece of this dish. Substitute an appropriate vegetable protein for the fish and a different sweetener for the honey.

Preparation

1. Preheat your broiler to its highest setting.
2. Whisk together the soy sauce and honey in a mixing bowl and set aside.
3. Mix the smoked paprika, salt, black pepper, and rosemary in a separate mixing bowl and set aside.
4. Generously dust the fillets, skin-side down, with the dry spice mix from Step 3. Let sit for a few minutes to allow the spice mix to adhere to the wet surface of the fish.
5. Brush the fillets with the honey/soy mixture until the mixture is spent.
6. Generously and evenly cover the fillets with slivered almonds.
7. Distribute lemon slices between the fillets, ideally one per fillet or evenly spaced on particularly large fillets. Place the slices on top of the almonds.
8. Place fillets skin-down on well-greased oven tray uncovered and broil for 7-8 minutes, depending on thickness. Fillets thicker than approximately 1 inch should stay longer.

Every time I make this dish, I’m taken back to that sunny table aboard that carnival of discovery and freedom, surrounded by deepest blue, exactly as alone as I ever cared to be. May it become a similar vehicle of wonderful memories for you, dear readers.

The post Salmon Almondine, Alyssa Style appeared first on The Perfumed Void.

Despair is a heavy burden, and I bear its weight by working out.

I am not diagnosed with depression or anxiety, but there are days when I wonder whether I should be. Hints of how I deal with anxiety are scattered throughout my writing, but depression is a rarer visitor. I’ve avoided any real accounting of my depressive symptoms of episodes because of one peculiar fact: they’ve been incredibly useful to me.

Anxiety drives me to dissociation, tremors, stomach upset, and organizing things until the world makes sense again. Depression drives me to work. My low spirits take away first the pleasure I find in the things I actually enjoy and purge the enthusiasm required to choose between them. The resulting boredom verges on physically painful. Between that and the guilt I feel when I go more than a few hours without contributing to my household fortunes, attending to obligations is easy. Switching from the agony of trying and failing to have fun to the relief of accomplishing something, anything is its own motivation, and I can’t even resent having to do something if my brain won’t let me do anything else. In utility, I escape my own mind.

I graduated magna cum laude and earned a Doctorate of Philosophy by the sheer force of my depression.

School is now almost a year behind me. Viable employment is still a strange, distant dream. Two related events drove me to anxious heights in rapid succession, which I should not discuss in detail here until they are finally resolved, making the passionate creativity of blogging impossible for weeks at a stretch. Recovery from those storms means a stretch of anhedonia instead of abject, desperate terror, and anhedonia means work. That means taking on a project or three to escape my brain’s enforced tedium, and once more glumly leveraging myself into a more accomplished future. So I’ve begun two long-delayed goals: I started teaching myself French with Duolingo and the mountains of French text on every food label in the house, and I started learning how to code in Python.

These are worthy goals in a town where francophonie is a near-mandatory skill and in a life that harbors few remaining aspirations for academia but never got tired of logic and loops. Worthiness was never going to be enough, when blogging puts money in the ledger right now and a new skill puts it in maybe later, nor was knowing that I would derive happiness from  solving the logic puzzles of while x < 10 and Excusez-moi, je suis une femme, d’accord? To get over the activation energy of these new, ongoing challenges, I needed to lose the joy of anything I’d rather do, and the excuses of needing that time for things I enjoy. It needed to become excruciatingly clear that I was not choosing between Duolingo/Codecademy and blogging, or the two and gaming, but the two and nothing.

So here we are, where the only thing on my mind is the perverse fortune of having “accomplishes things” as a depression symptom, and hoping for brighter days.

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