Cruddy Little Kitchen

Many years ago, my husband was crazy about watching Emeril Lagasse on the Food Network. Emeril had a live audience and a jazz trio, and he would make food and yell, "BAM," and he threw salt around with wild abandon, and I was pretty much horrified the whole time. Hey, I was still trying to learn to cook. I didn't know a lot, and I didn't know the difference between table salt and kosher salt. So when Emeril started adding salt to a pot of boiling water, or a skillet of pork chops, or, well, anything, I thought it was too much salt and it would chap my lips if I tried to eat it, and I was seriously annoyed with Emeril Lagasse's salt habit. (Now is not the time to touch on how much cayenne pepper or hot sauce Emeril employed. That's a rant for another day.) I also remember when I was writing for scrapbooking magazines, back in the hey day before 2006. There was a tutorial for how to make interesting backgrounds with watercolor paints and glossy paper. One of the...

I was looking for a recipe. You know, like everyone else every day everywhere in the world, I wanted something tasty for dinner. I had salmon. I had old tried-and-true salmon recipes I've used happily in the past. I just wanted something different. So I Googled "honey bourbon salmon." This is a thing I've seen on menus. Sounds great. I can make that, can't I? I have honey, I have bourbon; I have salmon. I can make this! Then I spent an hour slogging through a half dozen recipe blogs with long stories, beautiful photographs, freestyle poetry singing the praises of farm-raised salmon -- or wild-caught salmon -- or canned salmon -- and all of it took ten to fifteen minutes to load out here in the boonies because all of those popular, beautiful recipe blogs were monetized. Ads flashed. Clickbait beckoned. Video players popped up and disembodied hands cracked eggs into stainless steel bowls. I scrolled down, ever downward, ever onward, trying to get past the homilies a...