Meet the Winner of Your Best Recipe with Salmon

We partnered up with our friends at Alaska Seafood for our latest contest—Your Best Recipe with Salmon—with a prize catch for the winner: $500 toward all your summer seafood dinners.

A big congratulations to aargersi, whose Corn Husk-Smoked Salmon with Grilled Corn Salsa was voted Your Best Recipe with Salmon. Here's a little more about her!

What's your least favorite food?
I am super NOT fond of rose water or rose flavor. That's for smelling, not eating!

What's one recipe that's been on your bucket list for a while? Why?
Not a recipe, but I truly want to take a butchery class and learn to disassemble a whole four-legged mammal of some sort. Oh, and what's the thing where you layer all the pasta and stuff in a bucket or a flowerpot or whatever, and bake it, and then flip it and slice it? I want to make that—because it's both beautiful and also pasta. Yay carbs! I would love to make macaron but that's a bad idea. I have a small addiction that I probably don't need to feed.

Describe your most spectacular kitchen disaster.
Hmm, in recent times, I was boning out a whole duck (don't believe that bad Jacques Pépin—it cannot be done in 20 minutes) and I accidentally deboned a little bit of my finger. But I survived. And I recently made THREE batches of mustang grape jelly and none of them set, so I had to uncan them, add more pectin, clean the jars, blah blah blah, and after all of that it sure set! It is Very Firm Jelly—tastes good, though, all 22 jars of it.

What is your idea of comfort food?
I am pretty typical in my tendency to run to carbs—like red sauce-Italian-joint pasta. And wine. I take comfort in wine.

Apron or no apron?
I own a slew of them and I rarely remember to put them on.

What ingredient (or cooking tip/trick/recipe) have you been excited about lately?
My friend Dina taught me to tie these cute little corn bundles for the grill. You can put whatever seasonings in there before you grill. I am obsessed with corn and tomatoes and peaches and figs in the summertime. Also I have been modifying people muffins into dog-friendly muffins and taking them to the shelter where I volunteer each week. They love Merrill's carrot muffins!

What do you make when you're only cooking for yourself?
Often eggplant, particularly the eggplant Parmesan on this site, or some sort of fish, or an omelette. Or crisp tofu and veggie something.

Summertime ice cream store order: Go!
Coconut! Peach with basil! Lemon and thyme! Any unusual sort of flavor that I can't get just anywhere. Things with honey. (You did NOT say just one, and to be honest I rarely get a single flavor.)

It's summer harvest season in salmon country, so we partnered up with our friends at Alaska Seafood for our latest contest—Your Best Recipe with Salmon. Five species of wild salmon are available from Alaska—king, sockeye, coho, keta, and pink. Learn more about them here.