[food] poached salmon with watercress mayonnaise

From Epicurious, more or less. It is awesome.

1/2 cup mayonnaise [1]
1/3 cup finely chopped watercress leaves
2 teaspoons coarse-grained Dijon mustard
2/3 teaspoon lime juice [2]

1/3 cup water
1/3 cup white cooking wine
1 shallot, thinly sliced
4 fresh parsley sprigs [3]
1 fresh thyme sprig [3]
1 1/4 pounds salmon fillet

Mix first 4 ingredients in small bowl to blend; season to taste with salt and pepper.

Combine water, wine, shallot, parsley, and thyme in large skillet. Place salmon fillets, skin side down, in skillet; sprinkle with salt and pepper. Cover skillet tightly and simmer over medium-low heat until salmon is barely opaque in center, about 10 minutes. [4] Remove from heat; let stand, covered, 5 minutes. Transfer salmon to plate. [5] Serve with mayonnaise.

Notes:

[1] This is 2/3 the sauce and half the fish of the original. It made a nice dinner for two people with slight leftovers this way.

[2] The original wanted lemon juice, but we had lime and it turned out well.

[3] We used dried herbs and guessed heedlessly about the equivalences. I think the ratio of parsley to thyme was probably more like 1:1 than 4:1.

[4] The first time I made this, we started it on medium-low heat, which meant it took about 8 minutes to even reach a simmer, and another not-quite-ten to cook through. The second time, we had it on high heat until it boiled, then reduced it to simmer low, and the results were chewier. The first way was better AND it boiled off enough of the liquid that the soggy herbs + shallot could be scraped up and used as an additional topping for contrast.

[5] Only once we were about to dig in did we notice the original recipe said to chill the fish for four hours and serve cold. Screw that! The temperature contrast between mayonnaise and fish was one of the things I liked about this.

Separating watercress leaves from stalks is finicky work, but overall this is a very quick recipe for two people.

Scott Pilgrim conjecturing

This post contains Scott Pilgrim spoilers through book 4. It also contains pointless nerdy conjectures sparked by a piece of information posted on the artist's website.

I had expected 7 books in total, since, you know, seven evil exes. Perhaps that number also seemed more reasonable because of Harry Potter. But anyway, scottpilgrim.com says right there on the front page that there will only be six.

Ramona has variously said she has six, seven, or eight evil ex-boyfriends. I had been assuming that this meant seven 'boss battles', with her count varying with whether Roxanne was included ("I'm not a boy!") and whether the twins counted as 1 or as 2. Now I wonder, though: does that number include Gideon? He's presumably the figure Ramona is sitting at the feet of when Scott accidentally enters her head in book 4, and if I recall correctly, she's slightly evasive about whether he's "an ex-boyfriend" in book 1.

So this is a pretty thin reed, but I've been trying to figure out whether 'the twins' sound like a typical second-to-last boss or third-to-last boss for a video game. Gideon is a pretty typical final boss: shadowy, with an emotional connection to one of the main protagonists. Penultimate bosses tend to be brawny and overwhelming, I think: Sagat (Street Fighter II), Goro (Mortal Kombat), Pyramid Head (Silent Hill II)... ah, I'm drawing a blank. In Rock Band, Iron Maiden's "Run To The Hills" is the second-to-last song in all the solo tour modes, and it involves doing the same punishingly-hard thing over and over and over again for four minutes, whereas all the FINAL songs are longer tracks with some ebb and flow, some chances to rest and changes to show off punctuating the climactic challenging bits.

Given how scared Scott seemed at the idea of fighting twins, I guess they do make sense as a penultimate boss. But the foreshadowing about Ramona still being attached to Gideon really makes me expect some kind of surprise there, and the back-and-forth about exactly how many evil exes she has seems like the most likely spot for that to come in.

Also, is there actually a Chaos Theater in New York City? O'Malley is apparently scrupulous about using existing Toronto locations, but "Chaos Theater" sounds suspiciously like it might have been invented for a climactic showdown.

(Also also, I got NES emulation running on my Mac so I could try playing Clash At Demonhead. I'm not sure I see the appeal.)