Pesto Crusted Crispy Skin Salmon

This recipe is a simple and delicious way to prepare salmon (or any other firm fleshed fish – halibut is great this way too).  All you need is a few salmon fillets, salt & pepper, olive oil, and basil pesto.

Preheat your oven to 180C/350F.  Rinse the salmon fillets, pat them dry, and season well with salt & pepper.  Heat an oven proof non-stick frying pan over medium heat.  Make sure the pan is good and hot (flick a drop of water off your fingertips into the pan - it should dance and sizzle), then pour in a good slug of olive oil.  Place the fish fillets skin side down in the frying pan.  Cook them for about 5 minutes – you should see the color turn down around the skin, and the edges of the skin should start to brown a bit.

Transfer the pan to the pre-heated oven – DO NOT FLIP THE FISH – to finish cooking.  It should take about 7-10 minutes more, depending on how thick the fish is, and how well done you want it.  After about 5 minutes, take the fish out of the oven and spread a teaspoon or two of basil pesto over the top of each fillet, then return the pan to the oven for the last few minutes.  The pesto will brown a bit and add really nice flavor to the fish.

Take the fish out of the oven, transfer to plates, and serve immediately.  The skin should be nice and crispy, the pesto slightly brown, with a bit of a crust.  Serve with whatever sides you like.

A note about salmon: I tend to feel a bit guilty about eating salmon, what with the collapse of the pacific northwest salmon fishery and the horror stories you hear about antibiotics, antifungals and mercury in farm rasied salmon.  So while I don’t normally subscribe to the “organic is best” school of thought, I look for organically grown salmon from farms off Scotland – I don’t think the organic means much, as I don’t think there’s an official classification for organically farmed fish, but I’ve heard that the Scottish farms don’t overpopulate their holding pens, and don’t use all of the antibiotics.  Who knows whether any of it’s true, but it makes me feel better, and I think farm raised fish is about the only option for substainable fish stocks (never mind the Alaskan adds saying “there’s plenty out there”).

Chimichurri

We grilled some steaks last night for the 4th of July (not much of a holiday, here in London – go figure, but we had a nice evening anyway), and I made one of our favorite sauces for it: Chimichurri.  This is a traditional Argentinian sauce and marinade for beef, and I first had it at a local Argentinian steakhouse, The Gaucho Grill.  They have a number of restaurants around London, and seem to have avoided the curse of restaurant groups so far – maybe because they’ve stayed pretty small and upmarket.  They source all their beef from Argentina, and cook it in the traditional Argentinian way, turning it only once during cooking.  They have an excellent selection of Argentinian wines (this was also the first place I had Malbec, which has become one of my favorite red varietals).

Traditionally, chimichurri is made with parsley, oregano, olive oil, salt, pepper, and paprika, but I’ve been making it a little differently:  Finely chop equal parts flat leaf parsley and cilantro (coriander).  I usually do a half bunch of parsley and a bunch of cilantro, which works out to about a cup and a  half of chopped herbs.  Mince and add 3 or 4 cloves of garlic, depending on how big they are and how much you like garlic.  Add about half a teaspoon each of salt and pepper, half a teaspoon of chili flakes (adjust depending on how spicy you like it), and pour in good olive oil to fill out the sauce – maybe 3/4 of a cup.  Add about 3 tablespoons of red wine vinegar, and mix it all up.  If you let it stand for an hour or so, the flavors will blend, but you can eat it immediately.

Chimichurri is a fantastic sauce for grilled steak, or just for dipping good crusty bread in.  It also makes a great marinade for steak – just pour it over the meat in a zip top bag and let stand for a few hours or overnight in the fridge before grilling.

Recently, I’ve been using Aleppo pepper flakes for this sauce, sourced from Penzey’s Spices – a great mail order source for any sort of dried herb or spice you need, if you don’t have a good spice market nearby.  They also have a number of retail stores around the US, so check their web site to see if there’s one in your area.  I guarantee you won’t be able to leave the store without half a dozen jars!  Anyway, aleppo pepper is a bit less hot than your usual chili flakes, but it has a lot more flavor.  If you use it, double the amount for the recipe.  It’s also great on anything else you’d use chili flakes for, especially pizza.

Welcome

My mom told me she wasn’t turning any more helpless men loose on the world.  I needed to be able to do my own laundry, iron a shirt, sew on a button, and cook.  As a kid, I had to cook at least once a week, and I was encouraged to experiment with whatever I found in the cupboards.  I can’t imagine the sorts of things my family managed to choke down, but it seems to have worked - I learned how to cook.  As another incentive, the policy of the house was that if you cooked, you didn’t have to clean up.  My wife, on the other hand, has implemented a different policy – if you cook, you have to clean up whatever mess you’ve made.  I guess she’s figured I don’t really need to be encouraged to cook anymore.

Now that I’m married and have a couple of small children, cooking has, I’ve realized, turned into my chief hobby.  It doesn’t take me away from my family, and everyone seems to enjoy the results.  I like to experiment with different styles and ethnic cuisines, and I’m often inspired by my travels.  I’ll try post my current favorites along with old stand bys that I come back to regularly.  If you get down a few basics, you’ll never be at a loss for a meal, and you can come up with lots of creative variations.

I’m also a bit of a toy junkie, and the kitchen is a great place to have toys.  We’re living in a flat with a pretty small kitchen at the moment, though, so I’ve had to figure out what I really need and use (most of our kitchen gear is in storage).  Hopefully some of this will be of interest to anyone just starting out, or trying to figure out how to downsize a kitchen to the truly essential items.  I’ve often thought that a book laying out how to get started would be really helpful to a lot of people, so I’ll probably use this forum as a way to bounce ideas around.

Finally, I don’t just like to cook – I like to eat out too.  And since we’re living in London right now, and London is one of the greates cities ever for, well, pretty much everything, but definitely food, I’ll share some of our favorite spots.  Any reviews will be pretty limited – we don’t get out that much anymore, but I definitely have some suggestions.

So, to summarize, this blog will be about food, cooking, and restaurants.  And anything else I feel like writing about.  Enjoy!