Something is Fishy in that Jar…

Tags

Around My French Table, Dorie Greenspan, French Fridays with Dorie, lemon thyme, roasted salmon, salmon, salmon pasta

This week was the week for salmon in a jar. according to Dorie, one could

the first thing I thought of when I saw this recipe on the schedule!

eat the cured salmon straight out of the jar or roast them. Once I read that you could roast it and it comes out really nice and satiny, I decided I would cure the salmon, in the jar, and wait a day or two and make a nice salmon linguine with it! Maybe even keeping some of the salmon in the jar for another day, since Dorie says that the salmon will keep.

Finding the thickest, most uniform salmon fillets gave the poor kid at the fish counter something to do – he was very scientific and meticulous about it, probably driving the other people waiting to be helped a bit stir-crazy, as he lined up the largest he had found and measured the other fillets against it, and weighing them out until he got to just over one pound. I thanked him as he wrapped up the fish, thanking my lucky stars that I managed to get there on a morning where the salmon was fresh and not farm raised (or previously frozen)! They hadn’t even been sitting on the ice too long! Can you say score?!

ready for assembly!

I decided on some lemon thyme, because the smell of it is just so delicious and the pasta I decided to make finishes with some lemon thyme and it would just tie the pasta and salmon in a jar together nicely. That day at the market was pretty remarkable, as I also managed to get the egg pasta fresh, made that morning! I couldn’t believe my good luck as I carried my purchases, and Mei on my hip – diving for the grocery bag to find something to chew on, to the car.

light layers!

It took a long time to decide on exactly which pasta recipe to try out with Dorie’s salmon, but I landed on one that I came across at The Traveler’s Lunchbox, a blog written by a woman named Melissa that blogs about the food she eats around the world, her travels and the food she makes. This particular recipe she calls the little black dress of dinner. I do love creamy pastas where the sauces leaves a lingering, silky film over each pasta strand and stuck between its ridges, and the salmon excited me because I do love good seafood, especially when you can get an amazing pasta sauce with great fish, nothing is better! Except maybe a little garlic bread on the side! So this one was defiantly worth trying! But before we can make the pasta, the salmon must be prepared!

almost there!

I washed, scaled and dried the salmon, cured it in the brine overnight, then rinsed, dried and prepared it for packing into jars. The carrots and onions left Mei rubbing her eyes a bit, so we had to re-locate her for the duration of the packing and wipe her eyes clean with some cold water but she didn’t cry! A true sous chef in the making prehaps??

I’m not sure if there were enough seeds between the layers of the fish so I added a couple more (ssshhhh!), only time will tell if it was a good idea or not. I made sure I made this a few nights in advance so I could enjoy the salmon in a jar, roasted, after a day of bathing with the aromatics in the fridge. The lemon thyme smelled divine next to the salmon and peppercorns and just made it harder to wait for dinner the next night!

full up! as the British would say!

Pulling it out of the fridge, you can see the color changed a bit in the salmon and the onions look a bit softer, which means that all the flavors are infusing together in a beautiful medley that will become dinner! For kicks, I ate a piece right out of the jar while I got the oven warming up to roast the rest of it. That pasta calls for the salmon bits to be cooked directly in the sauce but by adding it in the last few minutes of the cooking, then I can just heat the salmon through and roast it, as Dorie suggests. So I did!

nice gift for a friend prehaps?ready for roasting

It took almost no time whatsoever to get the flesh to set during the roast and since I left the onions and aromatics on the fish in the oven, that meant that the flavor and scent lingered on the fish and injected the wonderful flavors right into the pasta sauce too! Lately, I have been making all my pasta sauces from scratch and this is one I will be putting some spins on and adding a few more things to make it a little more versatile for me. I think some lovely fresh peas would go so well with the salmon too! But anywhoo, the salmon crumbled into nice sized chunks in the sauce, and once the tagliatelle noodles were cooked through and most of the pasta water drained, we tossed the pasta in the same pot the pasta was cooked in, with the sauce and it came out blushing and beautiful, beckonning for a fork! I paired it with a fresh roll that came out of the oven just an hour before the pasta was done (my first ever bread baking experience, check back tomorrow for details!), and I had a wonderful dinner to sit down to. This is definantly another Dorie dinner that we will have again and add to our rotation!

sauce, thickening

PS. Mei even slept through the baking of the bread and pasta sauce making, so we had dinner early and I had a chance to enjoy some of it before she got up! How lucky!! And I ommitted the second jar with the potatoes because I was making a pasta, although I will make both jars next time and make a different dish with the pasta so I can have the potatoes too!

Buon Apetito!

To see what the other French Fridays with Dorie cooks made and how their salmon in a jar fared, click here.

Pate Cake! Pate Cake!

Tags

celery, cheese, crab, pate, pear, salmon

After a few gardening posts I thought we should jump right back to recipes and meals! The last couple days have been dreary and rainy and I haven’t been too motivated to bake or cook being that I had plenty of leftovers to eat and little Miss Mei has been yearning to become mobile!!

She tries to jump out of my arms or her backpack carrier when she sees other children walking around – especially much smaller children, close to her age. The past couple of days have allowed us to spend lots of time on the floor, working on her crawling and rolling over. She isn’t quite there yet. She is trying so hard though! It’s hard to watch her get angry and frustrated, but frustration will help her get to being mobile. We even moved the coffee table out of the way and re-arranged the living room so she has some more room to play on the floor and to make it look a bit less crowded with her new activity table set up; which only confused Patella.

Back to the kitchen!

Lunch was spaghetti alla carbonara salmone - from the other day, the last of it. It was great! We had to smooth out the carbonara sauce with a little bit of hot water, but it was just as tasty as the other day – maybe more so because the salmon flavor was a little more concentrated.

Dinner? That’s where the good cookin’ happened! Wandering the aisles around the cheese counter at the grocery store the other day, we came across pates of almost every persuasion and chose some crab pate to take home. Crackers are super popular to spread them on, but earlier that day I was reading in Food & Wine about making my own lox and I still hadn’t decided if I wanted to buy two whole pounds (for myself… since my husband is gone and I don’t know anyone else that eats lox) when I spotted the crab pate. So I passed on the salmon, maybe I will try out brining it for lox when my husband comes home? … something to keep in mind! Instead I decided to make a bagel melt! I found some bagels and picked up a package of swiss cheese slices, on top of the Rosary Goat cheese, perfectly ripe golden pears and celery hearts. Mmmm!! A wonderful meal was coming together!

Once home, I set Mei up in her Bumbo chair and gave her the new silicone measuring spoons we picked up the day before for her to chew on while I got dinner together. Now, I didn’t really need more measuring spoons – but this one is special, its in silicone and the largest spoon is for 1TBS and it goes all the way down to 1/8 tsp! How great! It’s one of the hardest things to measure is anything below 1/2 tsp – and they are small enough for Mei to chew on, soft and she can’t hurt herself or swallow them and its the perfect kitchen toy, see? She loves them!

I got the bagel cut in half and one half I toasted on a low heat to harden it a bit so it doesn’t soak up too much juice. While the bagel was toasting, I got out half a red onion that I hadn’t used the other day and thinly sliced it and warmed up a frying pan with some butter – once the butter began to bubble, I tossed in the onion slices and cooked them until they were caramelized on medium-low heat. With Mei propped up on my hip, staring at the onion slices swirling around in the frying pan, I got to thinking about making some red onion relish or caramelized onion chutney that I could just keep on hand for such an occassion where I wanted to make a fancier braut with some grilled peppers and onion chutney or a sandwich like this… another post for another day? Making some relishes and chutneys has been on my mind lately, I just need to decide which ones to try first.

Since my husband banished my toaster oven to the garage, and our oven doesn’t have a broil option – or if it does, then I’m not sure how to get it to broil… none of the pictures on the oven make much sense to me; I warmed it up to 160C.

Spreading the crab pate generously over the bagel turned it a nice rosy pink and started to emit the faintest smell of fresh crab that mixed with the caramelized onion and brought Patella running into the kitchen. I topped the bagel and pate with a generous heap of caramelized onion and laid a slice of swiss cheese over it and set it on a cookie sheet and slid it into the oven to wait for the cheese to melt.

it doesn't look as amazing as it tasted

Mei began a game of letting go of her spoons and waiting for me to pick them and hand them to her while I started peeling the celery and pears and spooned a generous half of the Rosary Goat cheese into a small dish to have with my bagel melt. If I swing by the cheese counter at the store, I usually pick up 100 grams of this cheese with little bits of blueberry in it for Patella. It makes her so happy because she loves cheese and she loves blueberries and its a great treat to share with her! I put a few cubes of her blueberry cheese on the cheese plate that I had made for myself and slipped her a couple bites of different cheeses while Mei and I stared into the oven waiting for the cheese to melt over the delicious smelling crab spread over the bagel.

just the peels left to show for a delicious salad substitute

Cracking the oven caused a wave of warm crab, onion and cheese to waft over our noses, making Patella whine, Mei close her eyes and shake her face at the heat and my mouth to salivate at the impending meal!

We put everything on a plate and headed into the living room. It was delicious, and Mei spent a good lot of her time objecting to playing with her toys so she could watch me eat and then try to grab my celery sticks with cheese!

So quick recipe? Here are the ingredients!

• One bagel, sliced in half
• 1/2 onion, sliced thinly
• crab, salmon or whatever pate or spread you desire. this can also be made with canned tuna or sliced deli meats or smoked salmon bits
• sliced cheese of your liking, I chose swiss, while cheddar is popular for many others
• mayo to spread on your bagel, or any other condiments you might like

First, slice your bagel in half and toast however many sides you would like to make. Spread your meat, pate or other spread generously on your bagel.

Next, warm up your frying pan, toss in a little butter, maybe 1 TBsp, once it starts to bubble, toss in your onion slices and cook until they are caramelized, on medium-low heat then remove and heap as much or as little as you would like on your bagel. Place your sliced cheese on top.

Broil or roast in the oven until the cheese is melted and your bagel is warm and enjoy!!