Anyhow, back to Valentine's Day. Lisa had demanded that I make her a potato and salmon dish like the one she had at the CIA. I don't have a smoker in my apartment (yet), so I had to either get store-bought smoked salmon -- an expensive and uninspired proposition -- or find an alternative. I got a small piece of tail-end salmon fillet from Citarella on Friday evening, and hoped 24 hours was enough time to cure it. Turns out it was perfect.

In days of yore, Scandanavian fishermen discovered how to preserve their catch of salmon by covering it with salt and burying it in the sands above the high-tide line. After a few days, it became gravad lachs: grave salmon. Today it is known as gravlax, and you no longer need a sandy shoreline in Sweden to make it -- a refrigerator and a two-pound sack of beans will do just fine. The raw salmon fillet is generously coated with a curing mixture of 2 parts salt, 1 part sugar, some herbs or spices (usually cracked pepper and chopped fresh dill), and a splash of booze -- I used a specialty akvavit I picked up on a trip to Copenhagen, but your favorite vodka or gin will work too. Wrap it in a porous material (cheesecloth is best; not having any handy I used parchement), place it in a roasting or baking pan in the fridge, and cover it with a 2-pound weight (you should put the weight on a plate or sheet pan to evenly distribute it over the whole fillet). Depending on the size of the fillet, you should have gravlax in anywhere from 24 to 72 hours. Just make sure to flip the fish over halfway through the curing process, and to periodically drain the liquid that is drawn out by the cure (the fillet will shrink by about 1/3 and become surprisingly firm due to water loss). Rinse the salmon thoroughly and pat it dry, and it's ready for slicing.

Gravlax should be sliced on a bias from head end to tail end to get long, thin slices that cut across the grain: the bias should be only slightly steeper than the natural taper of the fish's body from head to tail. To make Lisa's Valentine's Day appetizer, I shredded some russet potatoes in the Cuisinart, sautéed cakes of the shredded potato (seasoned with salt and pepper) in some clarified butter, and layered the finished cakes with slices of my homemade gravlax. I garnished the dish with salmon roe, fresh dill, and crème fraîche thinned out with a little lemon juice. Sappy as it may seem, I couldn't resist the temptation to use my heart-shaped cookie cutters on the one day of the year they would come in handy.