What's For Dinner Maddie?

Cooking takes over our lives.  I mean it really does.  If we’re not actually cooking, we are thinking about cooking, or listening to complaints about what we cooked. Or what we didn’t. We plan to cook one thing and then for one reason or another we are cooking something else.  We go to the grocery store for one item and come out with several bags full.  And then we get home to find we forgot that one item.  We just never know how it’s going to go…

I awoke to a snowy Sunday morning without kids and without a hangover.  A perfect morning to test my mettle with the twenty-somethings at the burgeoning pastime of women’s outdoor shinny. A couple of leisurely lattés and a mouthful of granola later, I grabbed my skates and, being of the New Age, I checked my phone for Extremely Important Messages. One new message from Son #1.  Ohhh riiiiight, he was home. I wondered if the hangover was about to show up as well. Please can you make eggs benny because [Girlfriend] has been talking non-stop about it since that time we had them. I guess Girlfriend was upstairs as well… But I adore her, so what do you say?  Let’s face it, we are pleasers, us mothers, and we derive tremendous pleasure from pleasing them through food, our food. It’s our affirmation. It’s what we do.  OK, it’s all we do… Yes, I replied, I will pick up stuff on my way home from shinny. An immediate reply from one floor up, Shinny?? Now? I discovered recently that kids may actually survive that rare occasion we fail to please them instantly.  So off to shinny I went, though not, as it turned out, with the hoards of twenty-somethings; perhaps they can’t drive in inclement weather, but with a lone sixty-something who outplayed me. Maybe I was hungover.

And then I hit Loblaws.  Now Loblaws always has something on promotion and the trick is to buy it right then and toss it in the freezer. Or if you are a less than organised shopper/cooker/pleaser as I am, then that sale item is your meal for the night. Or both.  I realise it means you have to buy an extra plastic carrier bag, which pisses you off because you have a zillion in that drawer that you can’t open because it’s too stuffed with plastic carrier bags, but who knew that pork ribs and Tropicana orange juice and the jumbo sized bag of almost healthy Kettle Chips were going to be on sale? (Coming up on What’s For Dinner Maddie: ribs recipe). So yes, I got the eggs benny stuff and I got the bargain baby back ribs and the kale, and, and… But, the primo super sale item was fresh salmon fillets.  Now, admittedly, I hesitate to buy supermarket salmon, especially after my spoiled years in BC, but it can be fresh and it can be great.  A quick interrogation of the fish guy and I was satisfied; sold.  And then I got sidetracked making eggs Benedict and doing more pleasing and I forgot about it until almost evening when another text: Son #2 was arriving home from Snowboarding in 10 minutes and had to be at the hockey arena for the Gold Medal Game in 25 minutes.  Why, I wondered, was he snowboarding in the middle of a hockey tournament? But I hardly had time to pontificate. Shit, was all I thought, here we go again; what the H-E-double-hockey-sticks am I going to feed him? Ahhh yess, the salmon; Poached Salmon!

So simple, so quick, so healthful for the kid who needs to reboot his energy stores.  And you can do one piece on it’s own quickly:

ingredients:

–Green onion, or shallot or chives; whatever you have, chopped; small handful per serving
–Dill (a great addition but not necessary if not on hand, but easy to buy when you get the salmon),chopped, 1-2 tsp per serving
–Salmon fillet, 4-6 oz per serving
–Lemon
–Sea salt

Working Your Magic:

-Preheat oven to 350
-Place salmon into an oven proof dish, in serving sized pieces if you like, or as one whole piece,
-Sprinkle with green onion, dill, and a bit of sea salt and squeeze lemon juice over it generously
-Pour a touch of water into bottom of dish, (not over the salmon!), enough to just cover the bottom; this is for the poaching (you could also sprinkle a wee bit of wine)
-Cover with aluminum foil and bake for 20 minutes, perhaps slightly more, perhaps slightly less, depending on the thickness of the salmon.  Check for doneness by prying open a section of the salmon with a knife or a fork – it can be a bit darker pink in the middle (I prefer it this way) or a light pink throughout.  Just make sure it is not raw and sushi like.

Serve with steamed rice (preferably basmati) and your favourite green.

I cooked two pieces, one for Son #2 and one for his Dad who was shuttling him to the game, and I placed them in little plastic tupperwares on top of rice, with a scoop of leftover hollandaise from the eggs benedict (completely unnecessary, but it was there) for them to scarf down in the car.  I then cooked two more pieces for me and Daughter, which we thoroughly enjoyed with grilled kale before we went to cheer at the Gold Medal Game.

I never did hear if the menfolk enjoyed it; the hockey game was lost in a shoot-out and Son #2 is the goalie. The only utterances later that evening were grunts, and possibly a few stifled sniffles. What they don’t know is that, win or lose, we just love watching them play.

What’s For Dinner Maddie wishes you peace, love and omega 3s!

Stretch the meal an extra day:

Buy a box of arugula for a quick and delicious salad of arugula topped with cold salmon for lunch the next day, dressed with a drizzle of olive oil, a squeeze of lemon juice and a sprinkle of sea salt.  Optional: tomato.