grilled balsamic salmon

• salmon fillet
• balsamic vinegar
• olive oil
• garlic cloves
  

Marinate salmon, vinegar, olive oil and garlic for at least 3 hours. When ready to cook, wrap salmon in tin foil, discarding marinade and garlic. Grill over a low flame for about 10 minutes or until cooked. Don't be fooled, cooking it in foil won't yield the prettiest salmon, but it will taste great.

The dish: Here's the deal: I love salmon, but I'm getting sick of saying the same things about it over and over, so today I'll do something different. Instead of touting the virtues of our friend who swims upstream, I'll give some insight into why this blog has been idle most of July. As I've said before, I love to ride my mountain bike but with all the rain we've had this year it's been tough to get on the trail. I've spent a fraction of the amount of time on my bike this years as opposed to years past, which is why I think I recently forgot a valuable lesson in riding; things go best when the rubber side stays down. The stretch of trail I crashed on is so familiar to me that I often will ride through it in my mind on nights that I have trouble sleeping. I have an intimate knowledge of every twist, every hill, and every obstacle, which is why I wasn't shocked when the trail crossed the path of a wet tree root, I had ridden over it countless times before. As is the case with such things, I'm not really sure what went wrong, but my front tire bounced in a way I didn't expect it to and I had an immediate yet brief sensation of soaring through the air, right over the front of my bicycle (impressive since my feet were still clipped to the pedals). I painfully landed face down a pretty good distance from both the trail and my bike. Without getting too graphic (you did come here to read about food after all) it was clear that my shoulder had popped out and just getting up was going to be a challenge. With the help of Kim and our friend Chris I began to roll over and miraculously (and quite audibly) my shoulder righted itself and 90% of the pain instantly went away. I was able to limp back to the car and decided to play it safe and go to the ER and have things checked out. Other than quickly dropping the bikes off, we went straight to the hospital and waited long enough to watch the movie The Minority Report (it sucked) on the TV that each emergency room bed now has (who knew?). As I suspected, nothing was broken and the hospital sent me home with my arm in a sling and a warning of pain to come the next morning. It was about 7 hours after the crash when I was finally standing in the shower and letting the hot water pound onto my traumatized joint. I didn't think much about all the elapsed time until two days later when I had an unbearable itch all over my body and my skin began to look diseased. Turns out it was a big patch of poison oak that broke my fall and I pretty much let it soak into my skin all day long. The subsequent reaction was bad enough to warrant my doctor putting me on heavy duty steroids and me trying every topical remedy I could find, which none really worked, which is good because the mind numbing itching took my focus away from my sore shoulder. Needless to say, I didn't much feel like blogging. If you want to be grossed out, feel free to check out my left leg and just picture the rest of me covered in similar bruises and red splotches. Things seemed to have turned the corner, I'm looking less like a leper with each passing day so expect to see more updates soon.