May 25, 2020
It’s finally Memorial Day weekend. Kevin and I have been excited for this long weekend for some time now. Kevin looks forward to having an extra day of rest away from work. I look forward to spending even more time than usual creating delicious meals in the kitchen. With the warmer weather finally among us, I’ve been trying to stay away from the oven as much as possible. The easier it is to prepare a dish without the oven, the better. My pasta salad is one of the dishes where I make endless variations of over the summer. It doesn’t require the use of an oven and comes together fairly quickly. For Memorial Day weekend, I decided to put a spin on my usual pasta salad and make a variation using the vegetables I had in the refrigerator. I chopped up a broccoli into florets and quickly blanched the florets, quartered some tomatoes, tossed in some cooked green peas, added some diced carrots, and tossed the veggies with some cooked rotini pasta and a simple red wine vinaigrette. The pasta salad would make for the perfect side dish. I scanned through my freezer and saw a large salmon fillet. I decided to defrost the fillet, cut it up into smaller pieces and fry up some salmon fillets to serve for a Memorial Day lunch. The tricky part about cooking salmon is finding the perfect way to cook the salmon so my husband, Kevin, would actually eat it. Kevin isn’t the hugest fan of seafood and would not eat seafood unless he absolutely had no other choice. The occasional times when he did eat seafood were when the seafood came battered and fried. I tried cooking seafood over the years, but Kevin still hated it. It took several tries and different combinations of flavors until I found one Kevin actually ate. The version Kevin would actually eat is made with a marinade of freshly grated ginger, maple syrup, miso paste, and soy sauce. The first few times I made salmon fillets using a ginger maple miso marinade, Kevin actually enjoyed the salmon fillets. Since then, it has been my go-to way of flavoring salmon fillets. To round out our summer lunch, I prepared some freshly sliced watermelon wedges, corn on the cob, curried chicken salad, and freshly brewed iced tea. We enjoyed the lunch together before heading outdoors for a short walk to soak in the warmer weather. With Memorial Day weekend almost behind us, we are excited to kick start the summer season.
For the ginger maple miso pan fried salmon fillets:
· 1 inch knob of ginger, skins peeled and grated
· 1 tablespoon maple syrup
· 1 tablespoon miso paste
· 1 tablespoon soy sauce
· 1 large salmon fillet with skin still attached, cut into 3-4 smaller pieces
· ½ teaspoon kosher salt
· 2 teaspoons of sesame oil, divided
· 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil, divided
· 1 stalk scallion, thinly sliced, for garnishing
Directions:
1) In a sauce bowl, whisk together the grated ginger, maple syrup, miso paste, and soy sauce. Pour half of the marinade into a shallow dish. Add the salmon fillets. Top with the remaining marinade. Sprinkle on the kosher salt. Let the salmon fillets sit in the marinade for 30 minutes.
2) Heat a skillet on medium high heat. Add a teaspoon of sesame oil and tablespoon of vegetable oil. Once the skillet is hot, transfer two pieces of salmon fillets skin side down onto the hot skillet. Sear the salmon fillets in the hot skillet for 2 minutes. Flip the salmon fillets over and cook for another 2 minutes on the other side. Transfer the cooked salmon to a serving plate. Repeat the process with the remaining oils and salmon fillets. Garnish the salmon fillets with thinly sliced scallions.
Takeaways: Another method I’ve used for cooking salmon fillets is with a sheet pan lined with aluminum foil. This method is quick and does not require the addition of oil. When I’m short on time and want to get dinner on the table as quick as possible, I cook salmon fillets on a sheet pan lined with aluminum foil. Depending on the thickness of the fillets, I like to cook the fillets at 450°F anywhere from 5-10 minutes.