Ginger Salsa

We picked up this recipe pretty much by accident because we were looking for a way to use the salmon my dad pulls out of Lake Michigan. It was one of those glossy 3x5 recipe cards in the little rack at the meat counter. "Salmon with Ginger Salsa." The salsa is basically these six ingredients mixed together:

One ripe mango, diced
One large tomato, diced, omitting juice if possible
Four scallions, chopped
Two teaspoons ginger root, finely diced
Two tablespoons cilantro, chopped
One tablespoon balsamic vinegar

It's pretty good on salmon, cooked any way you like, but then it'd be pretty good on a lot of things. Pork, for example. It doesn't suffer too much from variations either: last night we had two "champagne mangos" (which are small) instead of a regular one, and we forgot to buy scallions so I hacked off a chunk of a white onion. It was fine that way - the combination of sweet, vinegar, and cilantro is just killer.

Oh yeah, my dad. He's been fishing on the Great Lakes for decades. I asked him once how many fish he catches in a typical summer. He sat back and thought for a moment and said '... oh, I don't know ... two or three hundred.' For those of you who fear mercury levels in Great Lakes fish, my dad holds himself up as the counterexample. He's a human bear, swatting scaly things out of the water every morning and sitting on his butt in the sun eating them. You don't get much fresher--or much more in tune with nature--than that. The key, he says, is to not eat the skin, the fatty meat near the belly, or the dark-colored meat in the middle. Just the pink meat. He gives me a couple big bags of frozen vacuum-packed filets every summer, bless him.