recipes – The ExhaustNotes Blog

By Joe Berk

Few dinners are as easy to make and ritzy as barbequed salmon. It’s one of my favorites, and it came about as a result of dinner several decades ago at the now-defunct California Lawry’s restaurant out near Griffith Park. Lawry’s is a company that makes spices, one of which is their 17 Seasonings. I’m not sure why I ordered salmon that night (it might have been a first for me), but it was delicious. So much so, in fact, that I asked our waiter how it was prepared. He smiled. That was the whole point of Lawry’s having a restaurant: To get you to like their meals and buy their spices.

“It’s easy,” he said. “Drizzle a little olive oil on the fish, put some of our Lawry’s 17 Seasonings on top of it, throw it on the grill, and you’re there.”

The guy was right, and I’ve been making my barbequed salmon that way ever since. It’s a favorite if it’s just Sue and I having dinner, and it’s a favorite when we’re having folks over for company.

With that as an intro, let’s get into it.

Ingredients

- - Salmon. Duh. Yep. You can get a big container at Costco (although lately their salmon hasn’t been that good), or you can buy a couple of cutlets packaged like you see below. When you open the salmon, if it smells fishy or it has an ammonia aroma, bring it back to the store. It’s been on the shelf too long. Good fish will have no smell.
  - Seasonings. I think you can still get Lawry’s 17 Seasonings. These days, we just buy Costco’s bigger bottle of seasoning, which they call their organic no salt seasoning. A bottle of that lasts us a year or two. It’s just as good as the Lawry’s, but way less expensive.
  - Olive Oil. Get the extra virgin stuff. If you see anything labeled extra extra virgin, steer around it. It only goes up to extra virgin. I know people in the olive oil business. Trust me on this.
  - Charcoal Briquets. I like to barbeque the old-fashioned way, with a barbeque and charcoal.
  - A Charcoal Grill. Nothing fancy here. I use the cheapest charcoal grill I can find at Walmart. Every decade or so I’ll need to replace it. I like the taste of charcoal grilled stuff better than a gas grill.

Once you have everything, you’d good to go. This takes about 45 minutes to prepare, with a good half hour being necessary just to get the charcoal going.

Get the charcoal grill started and put the wire grill on top of the glowing briquets. Scrub the grill clean after it’s hot and spray the grill with a nonstick spray.

Steelhead, Atlantic salmon, Coho salmon…it’s all good. We prefer steelhead trout. Salmon is in the trout family, hence the name.

While the grill is heating, open the salmon container, rinse the cutlets (or the filets with tap water).

Rinsed and ready for the oil and the seasonings.

We do a lot of shopping at Costco. Their Organic No-Salt Seasoning is just like Lawry’s 17 Seasonings.

Drizzle a little oil over the top of the cutlets, and then sprinkle the seasonings on top of the oil.

Drizzled, sprinkled, and ready to grill.

Place the salmon skin side down on the grill for 14 minutes. After 14 minutes, flip the cutlets and grill for an additional 3 to 4 minutes.

Having a decent chronograph helps here (my preferred watch is either a Casio G-Shock or my Bulova Lunar Pilot). Any watch will do. But I’m not going to let a chance to show a watch slip by. If want to read our watch reviews (and other equipment reviews, too), they are right here.

There’s a hell of a story behind this Bulova.

Remove the salmon from the grill; it’s ready to serve. Just about any veggie goes well with salmon. We like steamed carrots, asparagus, a salad, maybe some citrus as sides (as you see in the photo at the top of this blog), and others.

So there you have it. Barbequed salmon, à la ExhaustNotes. Don’t thank us now; just click on those pop-up ads or maybe click and leave a donation to support your favorite blog writers.

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By Joe Berk

I love pizza. It’s not healthy, but the way Sue and I make it it’s probably healthier than the stuff you get in a restaurant, and it’s definitely way better (and way healthier) than any frozen pizza. Any recipe should start with the ingredients list, so here goes:

- - Pizza dough. We buy ours from a local Italian deli, Claros, and it makes the best pizzas. If you don’t have an Italian deli in your area, Trader Joe’s has good pizza dough. And if you don’t have a Trader Joe’s nearby, you’re on your own. Don’t give up; pizza dough is not always easy to find. But look around for it. Don’t go with prepared pizza crusts; your pizza won’t be nearly as good.
  - Olive oil. Don’t cheap out here. Get the extra virgin stuff. Costco has good olive oil.
  - Garlic. Get fresh garlic and squeeze it with a garlic squeezer. Don’t use the pre-diced garlic. Squeeze it fresh.
  - Shredded mozzarella cheese.
  - Shredded parmesan cheese.
  - Ricotta cheese.
  - Green onions (also known as scallions).
  - Kalamata olives. Some people like to use black olives instead of Kalamata olives. There’s no accounting for some people’s tastes, I guess.
  - Large mushrooms (I use 6 or 8, depending on the size of the mushrooms).
  - Sun-dried tomatoes. Get the kind that are bottled in oil; don’t get the dried kind. We prefer the sun-dried sold by Costco, but our local Costco doesn’t always have them.
  - Corn flour.

Preheat oven to 475 degrees.

Spread the corn flour on the pizza pan (the idea here is to prevent the pizza from sticking to the pan).

Flatten and spread the pizza dough on a large pizza pan. I like a thin crust, so we make it as thin as we can. It’s probably about 1/8-inch after we do this.

Pour a puddle of olive oil onto the pizza dough so that it forms about a 4-inch circle.

Separate one large garlic clove and use the garlic mincer to mince it over the olive oil. Spread the olive oil and the minced garlic over the entire top of the crust.

Spinkle a handful of shredded mozzarella cheese over the pizza. Don’t get carried away here; less is more. You want the cheese to come close to the outer diameter of the crust.

Dice three or found green scallions and sprinkle on top or the mozzarella cheese.

Chop up 15 or 20 Kalamata olives and sprinkle on top of the mozzarella cheese.

Slice the mushrooms into thin pieces and arrange these on top of the mozzarella cheese.

Sprinkle about 15 or 20 pieces of sun-dried tomatoes on the pizza.

Sprinkle another handful of shredded mozzarella cheese on top of the pizza. Again, less is more. Don’t try to cover the entire pizza with cheese.

Sprinkle about a half a handful of shredded parmesan cheese over the top of the pizza.

Dab about 20 quarter-to-half teaspoonfulls of Ricotta cheese on top of the pizza.

Place the pizza in the preheated oven. In our oven, it seems to heat more evenly with the pizza on the bottom rack.

We bake our pizza for 14 to 15 minutes. This cooks everything through and lightly toasts the cheese.

Remove the pizza from the oven and allow it to cool for a few minutes. Slice it with a pizza slicer and serve.

It seems like a lot of work, but making a pizza like the one you see above only takes about 30 minutes, and the pizza is outstanding. It goes good with a salad, a glass or red one, or maybe a Peroni. Try it. You can thank me later.

Other ExNotes Recipes

Yep, we’ve got a few, and we’ll have a few more in coming weeks.

Vegetarian Chili
Italian Meat Sauce and Lasagne
Norge Beef Stew

We have several recipes planned, too. These include grilled salmon, Italian stuffed shells, bacon-wrapped filet mignon, chile relleno, fish tacos, stuffed orange roughy, and more.

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