Salmon & Strawberries

I stumbled across the Inspired Edibles blog recently, and lemme tell you...I'm in yum! It's so good, I get all cheesy and lame sounding (since grunting doesn't translate well over the webz, anyway).

 I recently gave one of the recipes a whirl, and it was so stinkin' easy and so incredibly delicious, it's going on my "I'm too lazy to cook, and too lazy to drive to food" list. This round was the "Roasted salmon in a strawberry balsamic reduction," and you can find the original Inspired Edibles recipe & blog post here.

I won't bother going in to detail, because Kelly did all the work for me. I will post some food porn, though:

               

I made some adjustments to the recipe, based on what was around, and my apparent inability to properly follow a recipe, ever.  Since decent produce is pretty difficult to find in this town, I used frozen strawberries instead of fresh. I keep warehouse-club sized bags of  fruit in the freezer at all times, to make life easy and slightly less depressing out here.  Let's pretend I behaved and used 1 cup (probably was more like triple that, but, I'm a big strawberry fan so, yay for leftovers). 

Drizzle in some balsamic vinegar (okay, really, I "glurged" it around a few times). I have some pomegranate  vinaigrette that I think would be amazing in this recipe, so I'll try that next time. I also threw in the honey at the same time, because I was too impatient to wait, and trying to check my email while making dinner. Multi-tasking, probably not a good idea when hot things are involved....

Since the salmon fillets (from pre-frozen package) were pretty small, I popped them in the oven right before putting the sauce together, and it all finished cooking about the same time. About 30 minutes before starting this fiasco, I threw some butternut squash (halved, seeded, plopped face down in a dish) in a 350 (f) before taking one of the beasts for a walk;  tossing the salmon in the oven when I got back. Eaaaasy. 

After the sauce reached a hardy boil, (actually pay attention to the sauce, so you don't have to clean up an overflowing mess like I *nearly* had), I reduced the heat and added some rosemary sprigs I had just snipped from the garden. I felt a perfumed flavor would lend nicely to the sweet-tangy smell of the dish. So glad I did, since it balanced it out nicely. The nose knows, you know?

At this point I took the squash out of the oven, sprinkled on some fresh herbs (lemon thyme, oregano, shopped scallions), some sliced parmesan, and popped back in the oven to get all melty and amazing like. 

Since the strawberries had been frozen, they broke down in the pan pretty quickly, making the puree/mashing part unnecessary. Laaazy bones, right here. I let the sauce cool a couple of minutes before spooning it out on plates (time enough to achieve squash & melty-cheese goodness). 

Served just as Kelly suggests, spooned onto plates, topped with salmon, topped with more sauce. Apparently my plate had more liquid than R's, which featured a better example of a "reduction" but, being me, I was too impatient to photgraph his too. I wanted to eat it ASAP, and let me tell you...

It.was.GLORIOUS. 

Since the fillets were tiny, as were the squash halves, we supplemented dinner with the last of a baby watermelon, some homemade salsa, and our favorite paleo-cheat snack, Stacy's Pita chips. Fantastic. Easy. Friggin' delicious. There's a healthy amount of leftover strawberry lovlieness that I'll be swirling into yogurt tomorrow morning...or maybe just eating by the spoonful. 

So, go thank Kelly over at Inspired Edibles for this fantastic recipe. I have a feeling I'll be posting more success stories from her site, soon!