Dinner for one

Last night I was going to cook the salmon like I always cook the salmon. As in, put it in a pan with some salt and pepper and olive and, you know, cook it. But then I thought, c'mon, you've got some time on your hands, so what if you're the only one here to appreciate your sense of adventure, make yourself something new and interesting. So I decided to make salmon cakes. I'd never made them. I'd never had them. I'd never even heard of them til I got this book. It's not really much of a cookbook, more just a book with pretty pictures and ideas for mixing different things together in simple ways. It's great because I don't really ever use cookbooks, I don't really enjoy a recipe, I like to just throw stuff together and see what happens. But after a while you just end up throwing the same things together in very predictable ways. So that's where this book comes in handy.

The salmon cakes in the book look delicious, but I didn't have any cilantro on hand and I thought they'd end up being a little bland without anything, so I wandered around the vast world wide web and ended up using a mishmash of a bunch of different recipes. My favorite way to cook!

So I cut up the salmon really fine,

And then mixed in an egg white, some soy sauce and black pepper, and a little bit of lemon juice,

And fried the suckers. Liiiittle bit messy... is there a trick to not being splattered by scalding oil? Whatever, it was worth it. I know the picture doesn't look that great, they don't turn out very attractive necessarily, but they were ridiculously good.
Last night I tossed a few of these babies on some mixed greens and spinach, and then today after the studio and the gym (!) I had a zen meal of the leftovers, a cucumber and a piece of cheese, accompanied by a glass of sparkling water with a squirt of lemon juice. May not look like much in either incarnation, but I assure you, both meals were out of this world. Wish I had more...