Shortly before the solstice we happened upon a woman at the farmers market selling CSA-style shares in the output a collective of small Alaskan fishing boats, and bought their package that will give us salmon (and other Alaskan fish) in May, June, July, and August.

Part of the deal was getting their “holiday gift box” for free. That box, with two kinds of salmon, a generous amount of cod, some spice mixtures, and some recipes, arrived (frozen and packed with dry ice) in time for a solstice feast, but we had our various feasts for the solstice period already planned, so we initially just put our salmon in the freezer.

Now that our planned solstice and related holiday feasting is done, yesterday I decided to go ahead and cook one of the big pieces of salmon from our holiday box.

More or less at random, I pulled a piece of coho salmon from the freezer. (I wanted salmon, since that’s what the whole thing is all about. We’ll eat the cod in due course.) The holiday box came with some spice mixtures, but today I used a recipe from Mark Bittman called 4-spice salmon that Jackie found a while ago.

It turned out really well. I served it with some Uncle Phil’s long-grain and wild rice (easy to make, as long as you remember to start the wild rice an hour before time to start the long-grain rice).

I neglected to take a picture until I was half done eating, but you can still see how it came out in the photo above. We actually only ate 4/5ths of what I cooked. We saved the biggest 5th to go on a chef’s salad today.

If you really like salmon, and can afford to invest a bit up-front to get a steady supply, and you live in the Midwest, you might want to seriously consider Sitka Salmon Shares. We’ve only had one meal so far, but it was yummy. I’m really looking forward to substantially upping the amount of wild-caught salmon in our diet this coming year.