Tuesday, September 16, 2025

Happiness is seeing yourself revealed in others


 

Or . . . Why I Struggle To Write Blog Posts For 25 Forms Of Happiness 

 Robert Redford, Screen Idol Turned Director and Activist, Dies at 89

... “I was born with a hard eye,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2014. “The way I saw things, I would see what was wrong. I could see what could be better. I developed kind of a dark view of life, looking at my own country.” ...

Throughout his career, Mr. Redford pushed and questioned and then questioned and pushed. His tenaciousness served him well as early as 1969, when he was preparing to play the Sundance Kid. The president of 20th Century Fox, Richard D. Zanuck, told Mr. Redford to shave the bandit mustache he had grown for the role. He refused.

“It was authentic,” Mr. Redford told Mr. Callan, his biographer. “I got my way.”

Sunday, September 14, 2025

Happiness is my latest pie, a dilled salmon potato

Dilled Salmon Potato Pie

28 oz cooked salmon, flaked (I used canned, boneless, skinless, Atlantic, drained)
2 lbs Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled, boiled, mashed
2 eggs, beaten 
1/2 stick salted butter
1/4 yellow onion diced
1 T sea salt for the potato water plus 1/2 tsp for seasoning
1 handful fresh dill fronds, chopped
1/2 lemon 
 
1- Set the oven to bake at 425F.
2- Start the water on the boil; peel and quarter the potatoes; boil covered by water salted with 1 T salt, about 20 minutes to fork tender; remove to a bowl and mash with a potato masher, plain, and let cool.
3- Meanwhile, dice the onions; melt the butter in a skillet and gently saute the onions until transparent, and set aside to cool.
4- Drain the salmon and flake it; add salmon to the potatoes, mashing in until thoroughly distributed.
5- Add the butter and sauteed onions to the potatoes and mash. Season with 1/2 tsp salt.
6- Chop the dill and mash it in.
7- Squeeze one half lemon with your hands over the mixture and mash.
8- Add the beaten eggs and mash.
9- Turn out the mixture into a large pie pan, sculpt until level, and bake in the middle of the pre-heated oven 42 minutes until golden brown on the top, because 42 is the answer to everything.
10- Let cool 5-10 minutes, slice and serve on warm plates with a fresh vegetable or a side salad.
 
Makes eight servings.
 
Two slices will stuff you with seven ounces of salmon, which is 40% of the US RDA for protein. You can fiddle with the quantity of salmon down, and the quantity of dill and lemon up, as desired. The last time I made this was with 21 oz of salmon and two slices seemed not quite enough at just over five ounces of salmon, even though it seemed to me that it should have been enough.
 
You could probably make salmon cakes with this, frying them in oil using one less egg and no lemon juice in the mixture to reduce the moisture content, since this is the bones of a Newfoundland cod cake recipe. But at the end of the day, I'd just rather shove it in the oven down here at 42.9704° N latitude.
 
IYKYK.