Smokin'

We like smoked fish and fowl. We were introduced to the smoking process through graduate school classmate Lynn and her husband James. I still remember the chicken James smoked using apple wood. I bought RXC a smoker almost 25 years ago and he got great use out of it. It finally rusted out and got replaced with one with 2 levels which increased our cooking capacity, since some of the smoked food went into the freezer. Well the smoker came to France with us along with the small collection of wood chunks. Nice weather meant it was time to pull out the smoker and give it a go over here. So as if we have not been up to our necks in food events, we bought a whole salmon to try out the smoker.

French charcoal is very different from the brickets you buy in the US. We had a bag of charbon de bois left behind by friends who used the house many years ago which we used, along with some alder wood. The charcoal burned beautifully and the fish was perfectly smoked. Isabelle came over to watch how the smoker worked since they are fairly unusual here (nice to be able to share a cooking process and a sample of the finished fish with her). The greatest beneficiary of the smoked salmon however is Zabelle!

Now that we know we get good results from the smoker, we will begin to experiment with making fish dip. Last year in Florida we got addicted to the stuff thanks to Karen and Pete who are fish dip afficinados. We tended to order it in every restaurant we dined at and have a good idea of what we like. Now we need to try which of the fish we can buy here will work well. Stay tuned.