What to do with an entire salmon

My dad brought be a big fish as a 'just because' present. We're tight like that, yo.
The first thing I did was to cut off and clean the tail to prepare gravadlax. I've done this before and it's a great simple way to preserve something as big as a salmon when there's only you and and fish-picky bf in the house.

The recipe I used came from Everything Raw which a dated book with a liberal interpretation of what raw food is. The only reason I bought is is because it's looked amazeballs in this Flickr set, I love the drab, morose food styling of old Penguin Books, hopefully something that will become more of a trendy thing to do (check out these shots for German food mag Essen und Trinken).

This preparation highlights just how oily and rich salmon is.Very good.

Next, I decided to teach myself a lesson against experimentation with When French Women Cook. It's a sweet memoir which I read on the tube for a week and tried to pretend I was back in Chamonix. I tried a recipe from the Alsace region which called for reducing a glass of wine and onions to a tablespoonful to make the sauce for basically fried salmon. A delicious syrup which would have been nice as salad dressing, rendered the colour of a filthy rag you use to clean a blackboard by the addition of cream. Alsace Rouge, called for in the recipe, is apparently not red but rose wine. White would have been even better. The visual element of the dish was actually a big turn off for me, but the taste was fine. get it into your head that red wine and cream = vomit. I'm not happy, Maurice :(

Finally I made a stock (fume from the Paella book) with the head and bones and used it to make a paella. I really follow a recipe, but referred to 1080 Recipes for the rough proportions of ingredient. Incidentally, 1080 has a recipe for a paella made entirely out of tinned ingredients. I love the idea since it's such an expensive dish to make and it's difficult to concentrate on proper technique and timing when you're worried about preparing vast quantities of expensive, difficult to obtain ingredients correctly. Essentially it's an all in meal and fiddling about with a tin of tuna here or frozen cod steak there is a good way to get confident before you move on to one of the excruciating recipes in the Paella book.

What was that? Throw some shrimp on there too? You got it, pal.