I hope dinner won't kill me. But it's so good.

For dinner, I had some homemade cured salmon, with an arugula salad and a Fireman's 4 beer.

Cured salmon is one of my favorite things to make. I base mine loosely on this recipe from Cooking for Engineers. My version is very lazy and very easy. Basically, you rinse the fish, then coat it with a 50-50 mix of sugar and salt and whatever herbs or spices you like. Wrap in plastic wrap, stick in a drip-proof container, weight with a plate for 24 hours, then flip and weight for another 24. Unwrap the mess, rinse off any remaining mixture, and eat. This time, I bought about a half-pound of wild salmon, and flavored it with some Ethiopian bere-bere spice mixture I had lying around. I was a little worried about how the spicy and exotic mixture would go with the salmon, but it turned out very well. It doesn't taste weird or fishy, just a mellow sweet-spicy salmon flavor. Next time I make it, I'll try to remove the skin prior to curing, because it's always very hard to separate the fish from the skin after curing.

I had a huge arugula craving today. I bought bigger leaves than I normally do, so my arugula salad was very spicy, a nice counterpoint to the salmon's spicy-mellow flavors. Originally, I meant to cook some rice for a chirashi sushi sort of meal, but I didn't have time to cook the rice. Nonetheless, it was pretty good.

The beer, Fireman's 4, is from a (sort of) local brewery, the Real Ale Brewing Co out of Blanco, TX. I always thought it was an Austin-area brewery, but it looks like Blanco is actually out pretty far West into Hill Country. F4 is the only beer of theirs I like. I respect little breweries a lot, but their other beers are just ok. F4, on the other hand, is a drinkable, medium-bodied ale with a sassy label.