The Kitchen Witch – Salmon-Topped Dinner Salad
Salmon-Topped Dinner Salad
This is, without a doubt, one of my favorite things to eat lately. I love salads anyway – I eat a salad every day, whether it’s a salad for my lunch or a small salad to accompany a larger meal or maybe a fruit salad for a dessert or just a snack! And I maintain that there is no right way to make a salad – the only correct way is the way that is going to make you enjoy eating it. You and whomever you invite to share in this culinary joy.
You start with a piece of salmon. I buy the big pack of Atlantic farm-raised salmon from Wegmans – a local supermarket – maybe you have a Wegmans in your town. I’ve bought salmon from other stores but I think Wegmans has the best salmon – all their frozen fish is top-quality.
I take out one piece from the freezer and let it thaw. Depending on how much of a hurry I am, I either let it thaw on the counter or in the fridge. I don’t like thawing things out in the microwave.
There’s several ways you can cook salmon fillet. You can grill on either a charcoal or gas grill, broil it in your oven broiler, or bake it, which is what I usually do. There’s plenty of websites that can tell you the proper way to grill a salmon fillet, using either a charcoal or a gas grill – just Google it.
If you want to use your broiler, preheat it to 500 and cook the salmon for ten to fifteen minutes, until it’s pink and flaky. This is really the fastest way and it’s almost just like grilling it outside. But I usually bake my salmon. I preheat the oven to 350 and then I prepare the salmon.
What I do is take an 8×8 pan and line it with aluminum foil and place the piece of salmon in it. I prick the salmon lightly with a fork, and then I put one of two marinades on it – the one I usually use is freshly grated black pepper, dried minced onion and maple syrup. But if I’m out of maple syrup, I use a mixture of freshly grated black pepper, dark brown sugar and tamari or soy sauce. I let the salmon sit in the marinade for at least fifteen minutes – usually a half-hour.
When I am ready to put the salmon fillet into the oven, I close up the aluminum foil around the salmon – like a loose tent – and set it on the middle rack of the oven.
It usually only takes about twenty minutes for it to fully cook – thirty minutes at the most. You can tell when it’s done when it’s a lovely shade of pink and the fish flakes with a fork.
While the salmon is cooling, I make the salad. Because this is a dinner salad, I use a large dinner plate. There are any number of vegetables that will work with this salad. I rarely use the same mixture twice.
This time, I used a mixture of romaine and butter lettuces, sliced Vidalia onion, sliced green peppers, halved cherry tomatoes, and sliced cucumbers. But often I might omit one of those previous ingredients and add artichoke halves, garbanzo beans, French-cut green beans, spinach, hard-boiled egg, black or green olives, or anything else that occurs to me.
I like a creamy Italian dressing with this salad. It’s easy to make a regular Italian dressing into a creamy one if you have sour cream and mayonnaise on hand. Take bottled or homemade Italian dressing and measure half a cup into a measuring cup.
Add a heaping tablespoon of mayo and a heaping tablespoon of sour cream and whisk together until smooth.
I usually drizzle a little of the dressing over the salad before I put the cooled baked salmon filet onto the salad.
That looks pretty as a picture right there but put the salmon fillet on top and the rest of the dressing and wow! It’s something that you really want to sit down to!
You can see why this is one of my favorite things to eat right now!
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About the Author:
Polly MacDavid lives in Buffalo, New York at the moment but that could easily change, since she is a gypsy at heart. Like a gypsy, she is attracted to the divinatory arts, as well as camp fires and dancing barefoot. She has three cats who all help her with her magic.
Her philosophy about religion and magic is that it must be thoroughly based in science and logic. She is Dianic Wiccan but she gets along with a few of the masculine deities. She loves to cook and she is a Bills fan.
She blogs at silverapplequeen.wordpress.com. She writes about general life, politics and poetry. She is writing a novel about sex, drugs and recovery.