Salmon patties with roasted pepper and goat cheese salad

This was a nice weekday supper and it used up my leftover mashed potatoes. We had enough patties to give some to the babies for dinner the next day. I roughly followed this recipe for salmon patties, adding about a cup of mashed potato. The salad was just torn red lettuce, and roasted red and yellow peppers made in the oven on the weekend. I dotted creamy goat cheese over the top and tossed it with Stonewall Kitchen's Olive Oil and Balsamic Dressing.

Salmon patties

Worried that the babies were getting sick of scrambled eggs every day for lunch, I decided to try something new. Quick salmon patties to the rescue, recipe courtesy of Kidspot Kitchen. They liked them and so did I! It made a nice change from eggs. Now off to find even more lunch ideas ...

Salmon potato patties

Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas! These little salmon potato patties are a nice way to turn boring leftovers into something new and exciting. I combine mashed potatoes (and/or stuffing) and canned salmon in roughly equal parts, and then add an egg, a tablespoon of breadcrumbs, some herbs, and salt and pepper, and then fry the patties until they are golden on both sides. I hope you like them!

Sweet mahogany salmon

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I'm sure that like me, you've probably heard at one time or another that salmon from the Pacific Ocean is the best kind to eat — most Pacific salmon are free and wild-caught, whereas most Atlantic salmon are farmed and subjected to more environmental pressures as a result. Unfortunately, wild Pacific salmon are very hard to find and when you do, they are expensive and only available for a short time.

So buying frozen Pacific salmon is one way to circumvent the expense and restricted seasonality of buying fresh. I found a package of four salmon portions at the grocery store and have tried a couple of different ways of cooking them. This method is by far the best so far. Even though the texture of frozen salmons tends toward the dry side, this marinade keeps them nice and moist.

Sweet mahogany salmon

2 fillets of frozen wild Pacific salmon
1/4 cup soy sauce
1 Tbsp finely grated ginger and its juice
1 tsp Dijon mustard
1 Tbsp honey
2 Tbsp olive oil

Preheat the oven to 400°F. Place the two salmon portions on a baking sheet. In a bowl, combine the soy sauce, ginger, mustard, honey and olive oil, and mix together with a fork or a whisk to emulsify. Brush the marinade over the salmon.

Bake for 15 minutes, depending on the thickness of the fish. The rule of thumb according to the Canadian government when you are cooking fish in the oven is 10 minutes per inch of thickness, plus another five minutes added to the total cooking time if the fish is wrapped in foil or cooked in a sauce, as this one is.

Salmon sushi

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We made lovely sushi at home for our Valentine's Day seafood dinner. Big thick slices of salmon on nice pudgy rice balls! They turned out so well. The salmon was from Pelican Grill and tasted very buttery.

S found a sushi rice recipe online: we made rice in the rice cooker and then mixed in some water, sugar, salt and rice wine vinegar. We also put a little strip of wasabi on the top of the rice ball before laying down the salmon.

Belated Valentine's Day seafood feast

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S and I celebrated Valentine's Day a little late this year but our homemade seafood feast was certainly worth the wait. It didn't require much cooking and came together pretty quickly since we shared the prep.

We made edamame infused with Asian spices, fresh oysters on the half shell with parsley, lemon and cocktail sauce, and salmon sushi with soy sauce and wasabi. The only cooking involved was boiling the edamame and pressing a button on a rice cooker!

It was such a delicious meal. Try it and let me know what you think. I'll share the recipes in the coming week.

Rösti and smoked salmon with apple salad

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I loved the hot corner of the Pelican Grill's Battle of the Salmons, so I decided to make my own version using the smoked salmon portion that we bought there.

It was also a great excuse to finally try my hand at rösti. I love to get it at the Richtree restaurant in the Rideau Centre. It's one of those dishes that I love, but because I don't eat it often I sometimes forget that it exists. Shameful, I know.

I put the salmon portion on a plate and served it with an apple/cherry tomato salad, a dollop of plain yogurt mixed with dried shallots and thyme (because I didn't have sour cream and chives), and I made my own rösti.

Rösti

one sweet potato
one russet potato
one small onion
one apple, cored and halved
shredded cheddar cheese (about a quarter cup)
salt and pepper

Over a cutting board, grate the potatoes using a box grater. Handful by handful, squeeze the excess water out of the grated potatoes over the sink. Place the squeezed potato in a large mixing bowl. Repeat with the rest of the potatoes, the onion and half of the apple (cube the other half for the salad).

Add the grated cheddar cheese to the rest of the ingredients in the mixing bowl, season and mix well with a fork.

In a frying pan on medium heat, add a couple of glugs of olive oil. When the oil is hot, add the rösti mixture to the pan, patting it down to form a dense pancake.

Flip it when the bottom has started to crisp up and turn golden, about seven minutes on my stove.

Slide a spatula underneath the sides to loosen the rösti pancake. Take a large dinner plate and place it upside down on top of the frying pan. Turn both upside down so the rösti slides out onto the plate. Add more oil to the pan and slide the rösti back in to cook the other side.

It's crunchy, cheesy and delicious. Next time I'm going to experiment with some paprika and chopped herbs, and make this as an afternoon snack!

Salmon tartare croûtes with compound butter

Salmon tartare croûtes with compound butter on beFOODled's Flickr page.

On New Year's Day, S and I spent the day cooking with Mark, a friend of the family in Calgary. He has trained at the Pacific Institute of Culinary Arts, a Vancouver-based cooking school that emphasizes presentation as much as taste. Mark had a whole menu planned straight from his imagination and inspired by a full French service. He drew us diagrams and explained all of the dishes we would make. We were to cook five courses for dinner later with his wife and S's parents. We started cooking at 11 a.m. and served and 5 p.m. and learned so much! Starting with this appetizer ... salmon tartare croûtes with compound butter.

Salmon tartare croûtes
a fillet of raw salmon, ideally wild Pacific and sushi grade
a garlic clove, minced
minced fresh parsley
minced capers
bit of cracked black pepper
bit of salt
lemon juice

Finely dice the raw salmon and gently mix in the minced garlic, parsley, capers and pepper. If you make it in advance, put this mixture in the fridge to sit for an hour or longer. Fold in a bit of salt and lemon juice just before serving.

Make quinelles, those three-sided football shapes that you make passing the mixture between two spoons with many flicks of the wrist. Serve on croûtes (toasted baguette slices) that have been spread with a compound butter.

Compound butter
In French, these are called les beurres composés (composed butters). You can make a compound butter out of any combination of your favourite flavours. We made ours with roasted garlic and parsley.

Cut the top off a head of garlic at the lowest clove. Add a bit of salt and olive oil and wrap in foil. Bake for 45 minutes in the oven at 375 degrees F.

Squeeze the roasted garlic out of the skins and let cool. Mash them in a bowl with a stick of butter, minced parsley and salt. Roll up the butter in a cylindrical shape in parchment paper and put in the fridge to harden. Cut into thin pucks when ready to use.

Poached salmon and fennel salad

On Wednesday, S and I made a salmon and fennel and salad for lunch with Hermann in the kitchen at Les Tuillières. We poached the salmon, the best way to cook it according to Hermann, and had great conversation about the poaching liquid, which is officially called court bouillon when it’s for fish and seafood. Hermann started one from scratch (pictured above), but he said that you can reuse the same liquid over and over again, just by straining it and freezing it in between cooking sessions. At some point, maybe by the fourth or fifth time you use it, it becomes richer than the salmon and gives back more flavour than it takes, so the fish always gains. I asked Hermann how long he would keep using it and he said “Jusqu’à je suis mort!” So there you go, we mere mortals may come and go, but our poaching liquids can live on forever.


Poached salmon and fennel salad
serves 4

salmon fillets, fresh or frozen
4 fennel bulbs
1 tsp ground fennel and coriander seeds
juice of one lemon
2 Tbsp Pastis (anise-flavoured liqueur)
salt and pepper
olive oil
cider or white wine vinegar

Poaching liquid
3 1/2 cups water
1 Tbsp cider vinegar
1/2 onion, sliced
1 carrot, sliced
1 Tbsp salt
a few peppercorns
bay leaf, thyme, parsley

Bring the poaching liquid ingredients to the boil and simmer at the barest simmer for 15 minutes, uncovered.

Add the salmon and simmer for about 20 minutes. Remove from heat and set aside to cool.

Wash and trim the fennel bulbs. Cut off the tops but reserve some of the green sprigs for garnish. Cut the fennel bulbs into quarters, remove the core at the bottom and discard. Slice the bulb quarters as thinly as possible.

Place the fennel slices in a bowl and add the lemon juice, fennel and coriander seeds, and Pastis. Mix well.

Break the lukewarm salmon into bite-sized pieces with your fingers and add to the fennel. Add a vinaigrette of vinegar, salt, pepper and olive oil, and gently toss.

Boiled potatoes are a nice accompaniment.

Salmon Spinach Pastry

Salmon spinach pastry, originally uploaded by beFOODled.

S made this great-looking salmon spinach pastry last week. It's a recipe from his mom. I'm not joking—it really is only five ingredients! The secret is to use puff pastry that comes frozen in a package. The pastry is rolled up into two separately-wrapped tubes and this recipe uses one of those tubes.

This is the ultimate dinner-party food. It feeds six people, and looks so complicated that people will think you are a gourmet chef! But in fact, it's so easy that it has made me lose my fear of using pastry. There is some long-term prep, though. You have to salt the salmon the day before to get it to release some water.

Salmon Spinach Pastry

puff pastry (half a package)
one package frozen whole-leaf spinach (about 300 g)
250 g ricotta cheese
2 eggs
half of a whole fillet of salmon
Optional ingredients: half an onion, pan-fried and chopped fried bacon

Thaw the spinach in a bowl in the microwave (start with 6 to 8 minutes). When thawed, take out a handful at a time and squeeze out the juice. Chop up the spinach finely.

In a different bowl, add the egg and ricotta and mix with a fork. Stir in the spinach. Add salt. Add optional ingredients if using.

Presalt the salmon for a day and drain off the water. Take off the skin.

Thaw the pastry, about one-and-a-half minutes on low power. Roll it out with flour into a big rectangle about the size of a placemat.



Plunk the salmon on the pastry. If the fillet tapers to a point, you may have to cut off the pointy bit and put it over the bigger piece so that the salmon roughly becomes a square shape over the pastry. Cover the whole top with the ricotta mixture. Wet both ends of the pastry and fold up over the salmon. Leave a slit at the top to vent the salmon.

Bake at around 400 F (200 C) for 40-50 minutes or until pastry is browned.

Thai Salmon

Today I found a definite keeper in one of S's cookbooks. It's another way to do salmon besides my usual mahogany marinated recipe. This one's a Thai-inspired recipe that I adapted from Jill Dupleix's Good Cooking: The New Essentials, and it's really delicious. The chicken stock I used was a commercial one with a high sodium content, so I didn't use any extra salt anywhere, but you still can and I've indicated where in the recipe.

Thai Salmon
Serves 2

2 salmon fillets (I used one large fillet and sliced it in half after pan frying)
1 Tbsp fish sauce
1 lemongrass stalk
2 shallots, finely sliced
1 small red chilli, finely sliced with the seeds removed
4 mushrooms, sliced (I used shiitake)
about 40 g of baby arugula leaves (you could also use baby spinach)
500 ml chicken stock
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp grapeseed oil (or any vegetable or olive oil)
1 Tbsp lime juice
salt and pepper
fresh cilantro for garnish
rice

Put the rice on. Marinate the salmon in the fish sauce in a bowl in the fridge while you cook the rest of the recipe.

Heat the chicken stock in a saucepan. Add the chilli, mushrooms, shallots, lemongrass and sugar. Simmer for 10 minutes.

Heat the oil in the pan over medium heat (level 5 on an electric element). Add the salmon fillets skin side down, and cook for 3 or 4 minutes until the skin is crispy and golden. Turn over the fillet and cook the other side for a minute or two until also golden brown. Ideally, the salmon is still pink inside. Let rest on a plate or cutting board. Season with salt and pepper if the stock you used isn't high sodium.

Divide the arugula leaves among two shallow bowls. Place the salmon on top. Spoon the hot broth mixture around the salmon. Squeeze the juice of half a lime over each bowl and top with fresh cilantro. Serve with a bowl of rice on the side.

Mahogany Marinated Salmon

This is my favourite way to do salmon. The recipe's adapted from Dana McCauley's Pantry Raid. Because it's so fast and five ingredients only, I often make it for dinner on weeknights. If you want to make a more complete meal, serve it with a salad, rice or couscous with mushrooms, onions and raisins.

Mahogany Marinated Salmon

2-4 servings of fresh or thawed raw salmon (either fillets or steaks)
1/2 cup of your favourite BBQ sauce
2 Tbsp soy sauce
1 Tbsp finely grated ginger or ginger puree
1 Tbsp honey

Combine the BBQ sauce, soy sauce, ginger and honey in a bowl with a whisk or a fork. Marinate the salmon in this mixture for at least 20 minutes or up to four hours.

Preheat the oven to 230°C (450°F). Place the fish portions on a baking sheet and bake for 15 minutes, depending on the thickness of the fish. The rule of thumb according to the Canadian government when you are cooking fish in the oven is 10 minutes per inch of thickness, plus another five minutes added to the total cooking time if the fish is wrapped in foil or cooked in a sauce, as this one is.