Leftovers: Wild Salmon Two Ways - Wrapped in Prosciutto with Creamy Polenta, and Simply Raw with Pistou

Leftovers, I often think, are the home cook's best friend. At the very least, leftovers provide motivation: One of the cook's, any cook's, moral imperatives is not to waste food. And of course, using leftovers saves money - no mean feat, if your goal is to cook good food, on a regular basis, for a rapidly growing family of [insert your number here - it's not cheap for one, or for five].

But leftovers are more than that: Like the sonnet or the haiku, their inherently limited structure becomes the foil for improvisation, for efficiency, for making something new out of something old. Or maybe I've had that one-glass-of-wine-too-many and I'm blabbering, but I'm sticking to my guns on this one: I gain considerably more satisfaction as a cook by constructing a good dish from leftovers than I do by cooking from a well-supported recipe, replete with multiple stops at multiple markets (not that I mind that either, mind, but I'm trying to make a point).

Last night's dinner consisted of salmon; pistou; and polenta. And a salad of arugula, but I have limits on eating raw greens, so no salad tonight. Tomorrow, surely. In any case, I had a couple of nice chunks of salmon, some polenta, and a boatload of the pistou. It sounded like a coherent meal last night, why not another, different, coherent meal tonight? Enter my middle child, who - bless her culinary soul - believes that few foods are better cooked than raw. She was at 6, and remains at 8, an emphatic believer in steak tartare. And tonight, she sagely pointed out that, "Hey Dad, it's all well and good how you've cooked it, but can I have some of that salmon raw?" So we tasted it (this being one of the principle advantages of buying food locally, at the peak of freshness, from people you trust - raw meat need not be anathema), and sure enough, the kid had it nailed - if anything, better raw than cooked (I suppose that's the nickel version of why sushi is one of the finest cuisines in the history of human civilization; but I digress).

I rummaged around the fridge, found nothing noteworthy, except a pack of still-good-but-ought-to-use-it prosciutto. Add the fact that I was cooking for the kids (last night's dinner was behind schedule, so the kids got hosed on their portion, which is also why I had the leftover salmon in the first place), and kids have taste buds, and thus love bacon. They don't, however, appreciate a crispy salmon skin, tragic as that may be. And, speaking for myself, bacon can really make seafood (well, some seafood) kick ass. And so the genesis of the meal: Wrap the salmon on prosciutto before cooking it rare, and serve it on top of the creamy polenta, and alongside a hopelessly naive sashimi cut of the odds and ends of the raw salmon, with just a touch of the pistou.

Wild Salmon Two Ways

1. Trim off a few nice sashimi-like slices of the raw salmon using a very sharp knife (wipe the blade with a damp cloth between cuts - and if your knives aren't sharp, and you don't know what to do about, we have to talk). You want to end up with a nice, almost cube-like chunk of salmon. I've farted on about the pistou for two days now, so I won't bother again; grab it from the fridge. Put the polenta in a pot to warm, or what the hell, just nuke it before plating.
2. Take two slices of prosciutto, and wrap the salmon, first in one direction, then - after rotating it 90 degrees - in the perpendicular direction. Tuck and fold the prosciutto so that it's all wrapped up snugly, basically a birthday present of wild salmon in a wrapper of pig fat, what more could you one ask for? Except that I suck at wrapping presents. But less so, food.
3. The whole key to this is cooking the salmon such that (a) the prosciutto forms a nice crust, and (b) the salmon is cooked uniformly around the edges and rare to the center. On my stove, that means medium-medium-low heat, a few minutes on each side, just enough to brown the pork; but it took me a trial batch, which I overcooked, and asymmetrically at that. The hard truth is, you have to cook it by touch - feel it raw, and keep feeling as it cooks, because once it's firm in the middle, it's over done. And you know we feel about overcooking fish.
4. Season the sashimi with fleur de sel, plate over a bit of the pistou, and garnish with a basil leave. Slice the cooked salmon and plate over the polenta.