Salmon cakes: 1, Me: 0.

I apologize in advance, but this post requires some back story. I’ll get to that in a second, but let me just also preface this post with the fact that I don’t do well with general cooking guttage. There was the thanksgiving incident of 2010 in which I decided I was going to cook my first turkey, but didn’t realize that you had to yank the insides out of it before cooking. Needless to say, there was a lot of screaming and yelling and squickiness, even while on the phone with my mom coaching me through the whole thing.

So, when I tell you that I decided to make salmon cakes from a book called “Best Recipes Ever”, you’re probably going to laugh.

My grandmother passed away when I was ten. She wasn’t a very nice person, and I don’t have many memories of her, but what does stick out is that she used to feed her cats tinned tuna. To this day, whenever I smell it, it reminds me of her house and it has a negative connotation because of the whole “massive cow” aspect of her personality. If my parents were having tuna sandwiches, my mom would make me something else (this was the only exception to the “I’m not a short order cook” rule). Tuna is icky to me, and I’m not sure I’ve ever had it outside of the occasional ahi tuna appetizer, and even then it’s dicey for me.

ANYWAY.

So yesterday, I decided to make salmon cakes for dinner, accompanied by a salad with a ginger sesame dressing and some leftover sriracha chicken strips. Classy, right? I was looking forward to it. Little did I know it would end up requiring not only a blog post, but the “culinary disastuh” tag. Sigh.

I mentioned my grand fancy pants plan to a coworker, and luckily, she asked me if I’d ever bought canned fish before. I informed her that I had not, but after a lengthy phone conversation in the canned fish aisle of the grocery store with my mother a few days before, I’d purchased myself some sockeye salmon for my salmon cakes. The wise coworker asked me if I got boneless and skinless salmon. A-SCUSE-ME? Being a canned fish noob, I clearly had no idea that fish trapped in a can would have bones and skin on it AND that I would have to PHYSICALLY REMOVE this filth before I made my beloved cakes. I was in trouble.

I got home and checked my salmon tin. No mention of a lack of bones or skin. Not a good way to start off the fancy pants meal. But, being a seasoned remover of turkey giblets and such, I figured I could handle it. How bad could it be? It’s just a few bones, right?

IT WAS BAD. IT WAS SO BAD.

I opened the can, looked in, and nearly tossed my cookies. EW. People eat this? People gladly open these tins and remove all this crap and eat it?! Needless to say I was even more grateful to my coworker for giving me the heads up. She also told me that people throw it in the food processor and grind up the bones to get more calcium. After seeing multiple little fish vertebrae in the tin, there was no way I wanted to do that. Just as I’d opened the tin and decided to suck it up and take out all the crap, my partner arrived home, saw the expression on my face, realized I was exclusively breathing through my mouth, and told me he would be the slayer of fish guts. This is why he’s a keeper.

We ended up attempting to grind the bones up (too many! Couldn’t get them all out), but putting it in the blender only resulted in all the fish guts being thrown against the side of the blender wall, resulting in nothing being blended at all. Plan B: take out all the bones by hand (thanks, fish gut slayer). Did I mention that this experience also made me realize that my grandmother fed her cats salmon as well? Because she definitely did, judging by the smell and my reaction to it. Vom.

After 20 minutes of doing that, it was finally time to mix in the salmon with the mashed potatoes and make little cakes out of it. THANK JEEBUS. However, since the recipe actually called for TWO of those disgusting cans of salmon (and I only bought one; I’m pretty sure if I had to gut two cans I would’ve just thrown them out the window and made lightly flavoured potato cakes), and since the cakes were mostly potato with very few other ingredients, they did not flip very well. They ended up misshapen and soft, and cooked although they looked NOTHING like the lovely picture in the book. The lemon aioli was delicious, but it couldn’t save this catastrophe of a meal. I started the initial process at about 6:30, and we didn’t eat until almost nine. I didn’t even include the damn salad with the chicken strips!

So, what did I learn from this? Never buying canned fish again. Fuck you, canned salmon. Fuck you. Best Recipes Ever my ass.