Northwest Vacation Breakfast

Unlike previous efforts, this Northwest breakfast is not based on any specific dish. Whereas the grillades and grits that N'Awlins residents actually do make and eat, and then refrigerate to warm up for a midnight snack after an evening partaking in libations down in the Quarter (and then top off with a Tums sometime in the wee hours of the morning as we're not as young nor is our stomach as cast ironlike as it used to be), are a defining and characteristic dish I don't know of anything similar for Seattle. There are however, a number of culinary components that come to mind when I think of the Pacific Northwest and so I decided to put them together and create my own warped version of what breakfast among the cedars and rain would taste like. And besides, I had that salmon to use up.

So my Pacific Northwest Sunday breakfast starts with coffee. Deep, dark roasted, almost burnt coffee. The concentrated kind of coffee that makes your blood sing! Just ignore the ringing noise in the ears, it'll go away after awhile. Hopefully.

Once your hands cease the uncontrollable shaking, make the following:

Eggs - scrambled, with finely chopped chives and a grind of pepper. Add a nice bit of goat cheese if you want but it really isn't needed.

Fingerling potatoes. Parboiled and then mashed lightly with a fork these are then fried in a cast iron skillet with some olive oil until brown, crispy, and so good you'll be eating them out of the pan and making excuses why there's not more than a couple of bites for everyone else. Or don't make excuses - tell them if they want more potatoes they can get up early next Sunday and make their own! Then sneak in the kitchen while they're bringing in the paper and snork down the taters as fast as your tolerance for second degree burns will allow.

Salmon - now I know this is where I'm going to diverge with the purists. What is breakfast without pork products? One could concede that it's a much diminished and sadder meal and possibly not even worth bothering with. And normally, I would agree with this viewpoint. But one doesn't always have to eat pork with breakfast. I know this sounds like blasphemy, especially from me, but every once in a while one craves a little change. You know, like when you've been drinking Heinekens for a couple of decades straight and you get an urge to have something different - like a Peroni or Kirin. It doesn't mean you no longer love Heineken, indeed the dalliance with the vivacious young Italian or Japanese brew can rekindle the romance between you and your beloved. The same is true with bacon. Some times, no matter how much you love bacon, and boy do I love bacon, you want a little change.

And that's where the salmon comes in. It's something that comes from the Pacific Northwest (and lots of other places too, but let's not get into that here). It's healthy, with lots of Omega-3 oils and little or no transfatty acids or whatever is the current culinary villain this week. It's hard to keep up, the FDA should publish a website with the current foodstuffs we're supposed to be more afraid of then civilization ending asteroid strikes. Or maybe they do have such a website - it's not like I would actually go and read it or anything. My dance card of things that are going to kill me is already pretty full.

In this case I went with a little Asian influence and grilled the salmon with a teriyaki sauce and brown sugar glace. I find the combination of salt and sugar will go far towards destroying any health benefits that the salmon on its own might confer. In combination with the scrambled eggs it's a pretty tasty breakfast protein.

Finally, since it's the Northwest and I think of fresh berries when I think of the Northwest I went with some nice blackberries, that cost only slightly less than the price of a new BMW. Ideally, if I were to stick with the theme of healthy eating, I'd have served this as-is, with maybe a little cream or some sort of herbaceous flavored syrup. But it is Sunday breakfast and that means coffee cake! Well, Sunday breakfast doesn't actually mean coffee cake, or at least it doesn't in most households. In my sister's house for instance, Sunday, or for that matter any day's breakfast, apparently means Krispy Kreme! I'm really not sure what you could pair with those cholesterol bullets that would make a breakfast even remotely healthy except possibly fresh alfalfa, for the roughage you know.

But since it's my Sunday breakfast and I do like a bit of coffee cake on occasion, I made a tasty one with blackberries and pine nuts from a recipe I got from this book. I was especially pleased as the coffee cake recipe worked out quite well, which is unusual at our altitude of 7500 feet. There have been some spectacular failures in the past with baked goods.

All in all, Mary pronounced the Sunday Northwest Vacation Breakfast a success. I was pretty pleased with it myself. Now I wonder how salmon would taste if you wrapped it in bacon?