Alaskan Salmon a la Sven Holmberg

I'm in no mood to type, let alone cook! So we'll all just have to make do with


Alaskan Salmon a la (my friend, the actor)Sven Holmberg(who used to be a fisherman in Alaskan, though when I met him, he was sharing a ridiculously small Lower East Side studio apartment with his (platonic) friend, Melanie (a female Alaskan fisherman and actor). Once, after one of them had made a trip back to Alaska, they barbequed a caribou in the nasty, cement yard behind their tenement, and if memory serves it was really good. Also, I think they made their firepit out of an old trash barrel. The day my daughter was born, somebody called Sven to pass along the good news and he left a message on our answering machine to congratulate us and also invite "the happy family" to a party that would be starting at ten o'clock that night, if we were feeling up for it. Now I hear he has a baby of his own, up in Alaska. He's been back there for about four or five years now. And I thought I'd seen the last of him until we were watching "Me and You and Everyone You Know" a couple of months ago, and there he was, hunky as ever, playing this successful, callow artist ... and I can't remember too much else about the scene that he was in because Greg was screaming "It's Sven! It's Sven!" the whole time. I think it may have involved a coffee cup. Well, anyway, one night when Inky was a baby, Sven came over with some salmon that he'd schlepped all the way from Alaska and personally broiled it up for us right there in our 340-square-foot apartment, and that's the way I've been cooking it ever since.)

Get yourselves some good quality salmon fillets, 1/4 pound per person if you're trying to maintain your girlish figure, though a long tall specimen like Sven could lay waste to at least a pound and still cut glass with his cheekbones, so you be the judge.

Dot them with fairly liberally with butter, and sprinkle on some brown sugar, sea salt, and freshly ground pepper.

Broil them on a foil-lined broiler pan. After a few minutes, flip them, and unless you like 'em really rare, the skins should remain welded to the foil.

∞

By the way, that college-production-of-Woyzeck photo can't do justice to the gentleman, but the only other one I could claw up online is a real appetite deadener...though I bet this part paid for a lot of Huggies Supremes.

Just think. One day he'll be Googling himself and come across his own recipe for broiled salmon! Sven! Send us a picture! Actually, I've got a handful of flattering snaps from 1997, but in addition to being in no mood to type or cook, I'm in no mood to root through shoe boxes like a raccoon and then bust my hump figuring out how the scanner works. Oddly, I'm still up for eating.