Salty fish is not enuff

My husband is a prairie guy. At this point, about nine and a half years into our marriage, he has absorbed a fair amount of Jewish culture. He understands me when I refer to his family as the mishpucheh. He knows why I don't put butter on meatloaf sandwiches. He loves my chicken soup.

One of the truly wondrous things I discovered, shortly after moving to Canada, is that every single grocery store sells relatively reasonably priced quasi-lox. They call it things like "alder smoked salmon," but, to a girl like me, it's all Nova Lox, the unsalty version of the real deal that by the mid-80s was so expensive that using enough of it to make a difference on a bagel was living large, indeed.

His every day breakfast is now a toasted bagel, cream cheese, salmon, red onion and fribbles, I mean capers. Capers were not part of Sunday morning breakfast in the home I grew up in (we never toasted the bagels either), but when the lox is not salty...

In the meantime, I have moved on. Oh sure, I truly appreciate the fact that our only kinda sorta middle class family can afford lox every day, but sheesh, it gets boring. Yes, boring. I still love it, but it requires supplementation beyond capers. Pickled jalapenos work pretty well. A bisseleh pesto makes a nice addition. Shaved Parmesan, bring it on.

But change comes slowly to my prairie guy. He loves his lox, but is not ready to move on. He's more traditional than I am. It's the United Church in him, yanno.