The unexpected meal.

For almost a couple months now I've been making up weekly meal plans. I've really grown to love the meal plan system since it saves me the time of standing, blank faced, in my kitchen every night trying to decide what to make. The resulting grocery list for the meals is also very handy, both because it saves money, and it gives me the ability to delegate grocery shopping to Andy. So far it has been a great system with only one hiccup... the unexpected meal.

The Wednesday dish on my past week's meal plan was "Steamed fish and vegetables", so on the grocery list I included "fish" and an assortment of veg that would work in all of the meals I had planned. Andy went out and picked up all of the groceries on the list (salmon for the fish) and the early week meals went as planned. Then Wednesday evening rolled around.

About to make dinner, I reached into the freezer to pull out some salmon filets, and instead pulled out... smoked salmon. Smoked salmon. What was I going to do with smoked salmon?

At times like this, when I have an ingredient with no idea what to do with it, I like to turn to The Joy of Cooking for inspiration. So that's exactly what I did.  I opened up the big book, turned to the index and found,

Salmon, Smoked:

• Bagels and Lox "No, I have no bagels or cream cheese, and that is hardly a dinner"
  
• _ and Egg Sandwiches "I don't enjoy egg sandwiches without smoked salmon"
• Eggs with _ "What is this strange obsession with eggs and smoked salmon together?"
• Spinach Fettuccine with Asparagus and _ "...I don't have those ingredients either, but pasta seems like a good direction to take"

So I whipped together a simple white sauce, threw in some broccoli, peas, parmesan cheese, and the smoked salmon and then tossed the whole thing with some cooked spaghetti noodles. Then I tasted it. And it was... pretty good! A dinner debacle was averted. And, in the end, I had fun with the challenge of coming up with a meal based on an ingredient I never use.