antisleep.

Good afternoon everyone. No time for blogging at the moment: it's the crush of the music season, everyone is either recording, playing, or releasing music like there's no tomorrow. Well, at least they're playing like there's no tomorrow. There wouldn't be much call for recording and releasing music if we found ourselves in a "no tomorrow" situation.

Yes'm, that's what you get for using lazy cliches: utter nonsense. Welcome. We are operating under a sleep deficit, people. We've gotten hilariously bad at getting a good night's sleep if we have early morning appointments, and we both did both of those today (early appointment, bad sleep).

On my way home from mine (early appointment), I stopped at the much-ballyhooed Marqt for the first time (here are some photos of Marqt from someone's Flickr account). My initial impression was that I liked it but I found myself not buying much when I was there. The produce was not so amazing, though they did have fresh papaya, chervil, sorrel, thai basil, and a couple other things that you don't see too often here. Little minus: only one chile pepper variety, which is disappointing.

The highlights were the fish, meat, and cheese counters. There was some really gorgeous fish, and with lots of smoked options and homemade fish salads (instead of the ubiquitous industrial brands like Johma). I bought some good-looking wild salmon which wasn't outrageously pricey, and couple of pieces of cheese for Mara, a Taleggio called La Cascina, and something called The Red Love of Antoine (pictured above). For those of you silently noting the "light food" and "cheese" incongruity, all I can say is that these are very small pieces of cheese. Small and "light".

Ultimately, I guess I would've considered doing more of my daily shopping at Marqt, but most of what I buy these days other than fish and Surinamese condiments is produce, and I was not totally blown away by theirs.

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Elsewhere, for dinner tonight I'm adapting a recipe from Lang Leve Vis!, and it seems like it might work out well. Just to remind myself of how it goes together, it was something cooked in smoked butter, but since we're lightening things I thought I'd put the butter somewhere more controllable: a sambal/butter mixture that just gets "dotted" here and there, 1 tbsp per plate maybe. And another tbsp of butter for the salmon itself. The sweet and sour leeks were really easy and they're delicious. Let you know what happens with the whole thing...

UPDATE: If I were a real foodblogger? I would never let you see this separated sauce. But this is what happens when real life intervenes. You plate, the phone rings, your sauce separates, and you briefly consider de-plating your dish and re-whizzing your sauce, until you realize that that's utterly, unhealthily insane.

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pimenton-dusted wild salmon.
lemongrass broth, sweet and sour leeks, sambal butter.

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UPDATE II: The results were OK, but I think I'll use the individual components in other preparations instead of making this again...not really my style. It probably would've come together better if I'd served it with potato mash, but, really...we could say that about many dishes.

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