Friday Fail: Lime Butter Salmon with Cilantro Cauliflower "Rice"

Kitchen Fail #1: Instructions say to melt butter, mix with lime juice and coat salmon. Easy enough. But rather than fry the salmon, which would have involved me struggling with taking off the skin, I decided to bake it using my normal method of 15 minutes, wrapped in foil at 450 degrees.

See? All nice and wrapped up tight. Much healthier too…but there is a reason why the original recipe says to fry it. Because baking anything in butter just isn’t going to give you the deliciousness that is frying in butter. I might as well have coated the salmon in water. Couldn’t taste a thing except salmon.

Kitchen Fail #2: While the salmon is cooking, steam the cauliflower. Original recipe says steam for 4-5 minutes until “just cooked.” I lost track of time and let it cook for 10 minutes. Thought this shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

Next I placed the cauliflower in my food processor/blender and chopped it up. Here is the problem with overcooking. Instead of getting a nice “rice” texture that I’m assuming you’re supposed to get when the cauliflower is still a bit under cooked, I got mush.

Kitchen Fail #3: But it’s OK. I like the taste of salmon so not a huge deal I couldn’t taste the butter or lime. And mushy cauliflower isn’t the end of the world. So the last step is to add to the cauliflower the chopped cilantro, lime juice and salt and pepper to taste. Looked promising enough. The lime juice gave the normally pretty bland taste of cauliflower a little bit of a kick until….crunch! There was sand in my cauliflower! I took a closer look. Turns out even though I washed the cilantro, I hadn’t washed it well enough. There had been dirt and sand in it! I tried a few more bites and every single one: crunch, crunch, crunch. I was so disgusted that I had to throw the whole thing in the garbage.