The Write Ingredients

Our First Anniversary: Paper
May 4, 2007 marked our first wedding anniversary. We started the day with a fabulous breakfast at the Good Day Cafe and then sped through Hidden Falls Park on our new bikes. The rest of the day we spent dodging the rain and watching tree-trimmers scale our gigantic Ash and Maple trees.

The highlight of the day, though, was dinner. Since it was our paper anniversary, I decided to try something wrapped in parchment paper. Thought I've seen it done, and have probably tried it at a restaurant, I had never tried it on my own. A quick search for the word parchment on Cooking Lights website lead me to this:

Five-Spice Salmon with Leeks in Parchment.
It was actually very simple. Toast some spices quick, grind them, slice a leek, and put everything on top of the salmon, wrap it in the parchement and stick it in the oven for 20 minutes. I served the fish with a coconut rice with scallions. In the rice cooker, I substituted light coconut milk half of the water, and through in thinly sliced scallions at the end.



This is definitely a recipe I will make again. Even for company. The salmon was moist and full of flavor. We both thought we could taste butter in the fish, but I hadnt added any, so this was obviously just the paper keepign all those good salmon juices intact. The fish was also beautiful to serve. The light green leek against the mellow pink of the fish was beautiful. Highly recommened.

We paired it with a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon that we recieved as a wedding gift. One of three bottles some coworkers gave us, one each for one-year, five-year and ten-year anniversaries. I dont normally drink red with fish, or drink much red wine at all, but I thought the five-spice flavor would be able to handle such a rich wine.
I would like to experiement more with this parchment thing, so keep your eyes peeled. And did I mention clean up? Just through away the parchment. The baking sheet was clean.

So it's been a year, we'll have to do a search for the what the two-year annivesary is so I can start planning dinner.