Salmon Honey Butter Glaze

Many years ago, after I had moved to Oregon, my brother got a chance to come visit the Beaver State with Dad and another friend.  He made us dinner one night; this is the recipe.  He had the foresight to sprinkle some pecans across the top, but I left for the grocery thinking I was buying an entirely different kind of fish, and thus had an entirely different recipe planned.  When I got there, the fish I wanted was no longer on sale, but salmon was.

No worries--I love salmon.  And I knew I had copied this recipe from my brother many years ago, though I had yet to try it myself.

Salmon Honey Butter Glaze
Combine 1 T each of:

• brown sugar
• butter
• olive oil
• honey
• mustard

per every pound of salmon in a bowl.  Put salmon in a greased baking dish, skin side down.  Brush the glaze over the top and refrigerate 15-30 minutes.  Sprinkle with chopped pecans, if you have them, and broil 4-6" from the top of the oven for 10-15 minutes, brushing with glaze every 5 minutes.

isn't viscosity fascinating??

I didn't have soy sauce.  I used the last of it a while earlier making Bourbon Chicken.  In fact, I had to substitute a little teriyaki sauce to finish the chicken recipe.  I did it again with the fish.  Turns out teriyaki honey butter salmon is pretty good, too!

a little over a pound of Russian salmon.  Da!

Need to know how to grease a pan?  Check the How To tag!

Something's fishy.  Deliciously fishy.

I also might have overdone it with the sauce.  Instead of delicately brushing a little sauce over the fish and applying more later during broiling, I dumped the bowl over the fish, rubbing the sauce over the surface with the fingers that had already greased the pan and put the fish in it.  During broiling, I spooned up some of the sauce in the pan and dribbled it over the fillet.

Then the smoke alarm went off.

The Chief Taster stood on a chair, frantically fanning the smoke detector with a magazine while I opened windows and turned on fans at both ends of the apartment.  There wasn't even that much smoke, so I guess we have a pretty good smoke detector.  Comforting.

Here's what I think went wrong: too much sauce and a gas oven.  Had I applied sauce a little more conservatively, there wouldn't have been so much pooling in the dish to cook away to nothing.  We have a gas oven, so the broiler is at the bottom, not the top.  Knowing this, I put the fish at the bottom of the oven; this put the sauce closer to the broiler than most of the fish.  The combined effect was a lot of sauce nowhere near fish that cooked into a hard black veneer on the baking dish.

Luckily, the fish was fine.  Hell, the fish was excellent, but by the time it got out of the oven and I had finished cooking the hash browns, I was so frustrated that I never took a picture of the final product.  Sorry. Rest assured, it was very tasty.  The Chief Taster paid the highest of compliments to a cook: instant praise muddled by the first mouthful of food.  I'm not entirely sure what she said, but her eyes were very expressive in what I took to be a positive manner.