The recipe prepared for this week is from Class 19, Part 2, Les Grillades et les Gratins (Grilling and Browning) and is Truite de Mer, Sauce Verte (Whole Poached Salmon Trout with Herbed Mayonnaise). It can be found in the cookbook Le Cordon Bleu At Home on pages 84-85. More Salmon...yeah, we happen to all love salmon here. A whole salmon, with eyes staring out at you, and tail still attached? Not so much. The guys weren't too keen on eating anything that was so identifiable, so I opted instead of the whole salmon trout decked out in his fancy cucumber tux, for one of salmon filet decked out in a mere cucumber party skirt.
I cut the recipe down to one-sixth of the original as 54 ounces of salmon seemed like a whole lot of salmon for around here, and it was just going to be Mark and I eating it anyway...Alex not being fond of anything green and Matt liking his "just plain please." As you can tell by the plate in the photo, this is still a whole lot of salmon and my usual portion would be about two-thirds of this...4.5 ounces shown here. I would make less per person next time, or just shove more onto Mark's plate as there was no way I could eat all of this.
This was fun actually...I didn't have any interruptions today, so I was able to leisurely cook and assemble not being a tad distracted and all as I usually am around here. 
I had never made the cucumber slices like this before...I sliced them and then laid them out with a very light sprinkling of salt, and waited for three hours for them to become translucent and sort of bendy-like so they would curve around the fish. I can obviously use some work on getting all these slices the same width...even with a food processor, the pressure you put on the full cucumber made the slices vary in width...need to work on that part.
The homemade mayonnaise is just out of this world, so I did make that to assemble the sauce as I had time today to fool around with that step, the blanching of the spinach and watercress, etc. before whirling it with the herbs into green sauce. Yum. (I goofed when I was spreading it on the fish and contaminated the bit I had in the bowl with bits of salmon, so I had to toss some of it out, a big loss as I am thinking of several things I can use this sauce for this week and I didn't like wasting any of it...it is really tasty!)
The court bouillon was easy to make, we had done that previously, and the flavor it imparts as the poaching liquid for the salmon is excellent...it really adds to the depth of flavors and you can definitely taste it in the salmon. 
After I poached the salmon, I let it cool slightly and scraped off all the skin, etc., with a spoon, tossing it in the garbage and then spread the green sauce over the salmon and fashioned the cucumber slices into the little outfit you see in the photo.
The recipe said to sieve a boiled egg, white and yolk separately, and then place that around the fish. I thought it was just for decoration, but it was very tasty combined with the salmon, the sauce, and the cucumber, definitely a tasty little touch. Very nice. 
It was all amazingly nice and I would make this all again in a heartbeat. I would, however, make smaller portions as this was huge...maybe okay for a guy, but not a chick portion. I served it with a salad of romaine lettuce topped with dried blueberries, dried cranberries, slivered almonds, and raspberry balsamic vinegar dressing and threw a few grape tomatoes on the plate as well. A great combination, trust me.
The last photo is a bit of fun we are having amongst ourselves at Whisk Wednesdays this week. It all started as part of a little joke where Shari was keeping track of the butter she used weekly, and expenses, on her blog with the recipes. I was forever mentioning my pots/pans count and ALL OF US were noting each week how many dishes, etc., it took to make all this French food. Last week, as a bit of a giggle, we decided we would all post our sink photos this week of all the things piled up before we tidied up. OMW, all my friends and family are going to have a heart attack seeing this as I ALWAYS clean as I go and my kitchen NEVER looks like this. I wasn't sure I was going to be able to do it about half-way through, but I didn't want to let the rest of them down. So, here, in all it's NON GLORY, is the damage in pots/pans/utensils count for this recipe this week. As bad as it is, we have had worse, believe me...the French get their money's worth out of all their cooking utensils and equipment!
If you would like to see how the other Whisk Wednesday members fared in this class, click here, and then on the Whisk Wednesdays connect to individual bloggers, or better yet, come and join us! Shari has the ingredients posted on her site at the click, so while we can't post the recipe instructions, you can at least look at the ingredients, and I bet you can figure out a lot of it from there.
Christmas Vacation! Whisk Wednesdays will be back Wednesday, January 7.
Happy holidays!
Class 20 Rotir et Poêler – Roasting and Frying
• Class 20, Part 1 (Post on Wednesday, January 7, 2009):
Canard aux Navets (Roast Duck with Glazed Turnips) pages 257-258