smoked salmon with asparagus

Tonight I have to a bit more creative in figuring what to make for dinner. In the last couple of days I polished off 1.7 lb of hamburger meat in 4 meals of blue cheese mushroom hamburger.
blue cheese mushroom hamburger

While I could make the duck confit as I marinated a duck last night. However I want the marinate to penetrate more into the duck meat. The duck confit has to wait another day.
marinated duck

Each of these hamburger has an average of 6.8 oz of beef according to the mathematics. I am not so concerned about the beef or the cheese. I am more concern with the starch of demi baguettes. I firmly believe for most people what cause one to put on weight are starch and sugar, not so much with fat (animal fat included) or protein.
I bought a bunch of asparagus when I went shopping for the ingredients for the blue cheese burger. Immediately I fancy preparing the asparagus with a cream sauce. Perfect! I have the blue cheese and a carton of whipping cream. I have never attempt this before. My past result in cooking asparagus had been quite miserable. No fear, I have since watched a lot of cooking shows so at least I have some clue now.
Having little in the refrigerator I decide to use a package of smoked salmon for the dinner with this asparagus. I also bought some fingering potato. The plan was formulated.
I blanched the asparagus for just a couple of minutes in lightly salted water and crunched them in cold water. Easy as that.
The smoked salmon was bought from Costco. It is a wet smoked salmon from Alaska with four 8oz pack in a package for $19.95. So it works out to about $5 per vacuum pack as in the picture below.
When I first saw these smoked salmon I was surprised that it is in the section with the canned tuna. I would later realize with the vacuum packs it is essentially equivalent to the canning process.

i just warmed up the vacuum pack of salmon in a bath of hot water

The cream sauce cannot be simpler. I just saute a little bit of minced garlic, poured in about 2 table spoons of crumbled blue cheese and add a bit of whipping cream and reduce. Seasoned with salt and pepper. As it turned out the sauce did not thicken enough with the reduction. I quickly stirred in some cornstarch water solution and the result is a beautiful blue cheese cream sauce. At the mean time the potato fingerings are ready after boiling in a lightly salted solution for about 12 minutes.

i sprinkled some fresh chives onto the cream sauce; my asparagus had never turn out this good

the potato also get the nurturing of the cream sauce; i also pour in the juice from the smoke salmon

 i licked the plate clean - love that blue cheese