I’ve got a few tried and true salmon recipes that I make over and over, but they get boring after a while so I keep trying to mix it up. Here are a few I tried out on portions of a huge, beautiful fillet of salmon we cooked up a few weeks ago. Above is a simply baked piece of salmon over couscous with a lemon thyme beurre blanc sauce. It was very tasty, and a quick-fix meal for a night that I had very little available time. If I’d had my head on straight, I would have thrown some broccoli on to steam, because that would go beautifully with the beurre blanc as well.
This one was another simply cooked salmon, grilled this time, and topped with a balsamic glaze. I took my eye off the glaze for a bit too long thanks to the baby, so it was black and syrupy in the extreme. It tasted alright, but wasn’t particularly memorable; I’d make it again only if I was scrounging for a recipe to make from pantry ingredients, and even then I’d turn to that beurre blanc first. I served it with rice and some baby spinach sauteed with garlic and olive oil.
This salad, made with the fraction of the fillet I had left after two full meals, was the best recipe of the bunch. I just cut the salmon into strips, pan-roasted it skin-side first, and placed it over a salad of greens, roasted red pepper, and the mustard vinaigrette from the Macrina Bakery Cookbook
Mustard Vinaigrette
1 T Dijon mustard
1 T sherry vinegar
1 T finely chopped shallots
1 tsp honey
1 tsp chopped fresh thyme
3/4 C extra virgin olive oil
Kosher salt
Freshly ground pepper
In a small bowl, combine everything but olive oil and S/P. Whisk in the olive oil very slowly to form an emulsion, then season with S/P to taste.
Source: Leslie Mackie’s Macrina Bakery & Cafe Cookbook
