It's a scary thing to say, but I've been struggling for inspiration in the kitchen recently. If you follow my blog, but I highly doubt anyone has this closely, you may notice that I have posted recipes that I'm slightly ambiguous about, asked myself if I really did like it , decided on no, and regretfully deleted a few days later. It's terrible if I want to do real cook book writing one day, but I'll only bother developing and posting a recipe if it's good on the first go; if a recipe is truly bad to start off with, I can't make it any better, and there lay many ideas left abandoned, waiting to be developed through my extensive foodie archives. However, what does quite often happen is I'll go back to a successful recipe, notice a few improvements and update the post, and I feel much less bad about that then simply deleting it. Unfortunately, most of my recent attempts at food ended up a failure, and I wondered, with a petty hopelessness, what was I going to do? I breathed out, or more coarsely, I stopped being a snob.
What I mean by that is I relaxed my fundamentals in cooking, and didn't bother sticking rigidly to tradition. A good example of this is in Asian food- since I'm not knowledgeable enough about that region of cooking, I don't feel I can play with flavours, so I try and cook something with a name with ultimate tradition, so I can be sure it tastes good, and I don't offend any Asian food purists. However, this means I buy ingredients that never get a second use and I don't get a chance to exercise my own creativity, so I've let this tedious rule go. Therefore, today I decided to use Japanese flavours from my storcupboard to whip this up; entirely Japanese in essence, but without any particular pinpoint of inspiration. Despite this new loose attitude, I still can't, and never will, abide the disgraceful term 'fusion food'. Stupid arrogance has led to innovations that take ingredients and themes from two entirely different cuisines and attempt to bind them together. Think about it, would you rather a real, Spanish street food treat, or a concoction pitched somewhere between Jamaican food and Spanish? You'd end up somewhere in the Caribbean Sea, and it would taste as revolting as the seawater.
Anyway, enough nonsense, this salmon (which I buy cook from frozen, and it's more practical than buying fresh, although taste is slightly sacrificed) is infused lusciously with lime leaves, sake and wasabi and is served over a peppery salad of watercress, with that sprightliness countered by semi-spheres of creamy, cooling avocado and a lovely scattering of soft, sweet edemame beans. It may be the crazy mathematician inside me, but I do think it works a lot better if you flake the salmon over the greens rather than serve the whole fillets along side. Trust me.
More advantages of this dish are it is incredibly quick and easy, very healthy, and the new ingredients you have acquired can be used for many delicious Japanese recipes- think sushi and chicken teriyaki, all here on Prawnsandhummus.
1)In a small bowl, whisk 2 tbsp of sake with 1 1/2 tsp wasabi paste, and whisk well with some coarse sea salt and 2 tbsp vegetable oil. Drizzle over 4 salmon fillets in a foil packet, and top with some broken up lime leaves. Bake at 180 for about 15 minutes, until tender and hot. This is the timing I would suggest for fillets you cook from frozen- if you're going for fresh I'd say two is plenty to serve 4 as they tend to be bigger and only cook them for about 7 minutes- ideally you're looking for them to be a bit coral within.
2)Take the salmon out and leave to stand whilst you tip two bags of washed watercress onto a plate or salad bowl, and dress with a teeny bit of toasted sesame oil, and then take a small rounded teaspoon and scoop out curls of avocado from the opened fruit. Place ontop of the watercress, dress with lime juice, flake the salmon over the top, along with a little of its cooking liquor and for a tiny little further seasoning, flakes of nori (seaweed) torn or snipped over the top. For the beans take about 175g frozen and either steam or microwave until they're tender. Fresh coriander leaves would not be out of place here, either.
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