Notable exceptions only

I was lucky enough to finally have a meeting with a group we are looking at sponsoring over breakfast. Lucky because it starts the day with eggs and toast. It is nice to have every once in a while. I got to Key's a bit early and they set me up some nice diner coffee and the waitress took notice that I was staring into space and gave me a paper. That's someone looking out for you.

My meeting was to go over plans for upcoming year, which we discussed, but really we talked about diner food for awhile. Good diner food is hard to replicate. The problem with average diner food - aka Perkins is that it has no character. I like Key's because if you want eggs and toast - it is called eggs and toast. It's not the 'Craftsman Starter!' or some bull crap like "Lumberjack Stacks' for three pancakes. They have interesting name for three pancakes. It's called three pancakes. I can give them crap about a loon omelet, which contains no actual loon meat, in fact it contains turkey. Check out their menu, they did not want to spend the 30 minutes typing the menu into a webpage so they just scanned the damn thing in to a pdf format. Actually it looks like someone used their digital camera.

After the meeting I got back to the office and started my day of meetings, all good and fairly productive meetings, with a wide range of topics, but still a long day which makes it hard to get a days worth of work complete.

I had to chow down quickly on lunches but had time to read a little of SuperFreakonmics. I am reading about their thoughts on global warming, which I guess was a little surprising. The book is talking about how if we wanted to cool down the planet, there is a group that has come up with a fairly simple and "low cost" method to (which I am making very simplified and slightly inaccurate) spew a volcanic ash substance in upper atmosphere to defuse sunlight with a big long house and pool pumps.

After my last meeting I made my way home to get the grill going for dinner. This evening I made salmon cakes for dinner on the grill. Really simple actually if you have salmon available. I started with getting the grill going with a neutral natural charcoal, Wicked Good Charcoal, as to not mask the alder wood I was soaking. I removed the grill grate and sprayed the grill with some cooking spray.

The salmon cakes consisted of boneless salmon chunks (about a pound or so), 1/4 cup of chopped onion and a tablespoon of Dijon mustard in a food processor. Then I added about a tablespoon of olive oil, red pepper flakes, a couple tablespoons of fresh parsley, some salt and pepper and mixed that a bit more in the processor. Finally I added an egg and bread crumbs. Mixed all that fairly well and made about five patties for grilling and put it in the freezer for about 10 minutes. When I took it out of the freezer I sprinkled some dry rosemary on the patties and got it out to the grill.

I had the grill about medium to high direct heat, really about 400 degrees and threw four small chunks of the alder wood and put the grate back on the grill. Threw the patties on and turned them at about four minutes each side, may be longer on the first side. Not bad, had a little bite to them and all is well.

Feeling good about making it the weekend at this point.

Tonight the writings are powered by the music of Arcade Fire.