Yesterday, Annette, Phyllis (Annette’s mom) and I decided to attend one of the local festivities, which we have been intending to visit for several years. The Greenfield Fire department, just down the road from us (well, about 30 minutes away) has an annual planked salmon dinner to raise money for community events.

Planked salmon is (almost) what it sounds like. Many recipes use a small cedar plank placed on the BBQ. However, ‘real’ planked salmon is cooked in the following manner.

First, you need a very big fire, especially if you are going to cook enough for about 1000 people, which is how many customers the fire department served last year.

Then, you need to tie the salmon to planks, something like this:

Then, you need to get some firemen to cook the salmon (not hard to do when you are at a fire hall).

When you have gathered all these items together, you can then start to cook the salmon by placing the planks towards the fire and maintaining a roaring blaze to sear the salmon to a juicy finish.

Due to the crowds trying to get in on the feast, we had to wait until our ticket numbers were called before we could actually get our hands on some of that salmon. Finally, we were called and into the firehall we went to eat a plateful of salmon and potato salad.