Butter Roasted Salmon w Hazelnut Pesto

Modifying and combining two different recipes I sourced from Bon Appetit led to a fantastic dinner this evening. Really one of the best salmon preparations I've had in some time. I hope you give it a try.

ingredients

1/2 cup hazelnuts, finely chopped
1 garlic clove, chopped
1 T fresh oregano
1 T fresh thyme
1/2 cup (packed) fresh flat-leaf parsley leaves
1 tablespoon capers
1 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest
1/2 cup olive oil (I prefer lemon olive oil)
Kosher salt
4 6-ounce pieces skin-on salmon fillets (optional, can also prepare with skinless fillets)
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into pieces
Arugula (about 1/2 cup per person)
1 large honeycrisp apple, cored and diced
Dash of lemon juice
2 celery stalks, peeled
1 T caraway seeds
Lemon vinaigrette (your favorite brand or recipe)

preparation

Preheat oven to 400°. Toast hazelnuts on a rimmed baking sheet, tossing occasionally, until golden brown, 6-8 minutes. Let cool.

Pulse garlic, herbs, capers, lemon zest, in a food processor until finely chopped. Warm olive oil in a small saucepan; add garlic mixture to oil and sauté until fragrant. Season pesto with salt and stir in hazelnuts. Remove from heat and set aside.

Using vegetable peeler, create paper thin slivers of celery out of the stalks. Drizzle lemon juice over diced apple to prevent browning. Toast caraway seeds until fragrant. Combine arugula, apple, celery, seeds in salad bowl. Set aside.

Heat butter in a large ovenproof skillet over medium-high heat. Season salmon with salt and cook, skin side down, until skin is crisp (do not disturb), about 3 minutes, basting constantly. Transfer to oven and roast salmon, basting once, until medium-rare (mostly opaque but still slightly translucent in the center), about 3 minutes.

Pour vinaigrette over salad (to taste) and toss.

Plate salmon, skin side up, topped with pesto, with salad alongside.

Comments

Board Game Review: Lost Cities Roll & Write (A Comparison to the Original Lost Cities)

I really love the card game Lost Cities , designed by Reiner Knizia. When my husband Christopher and I were first getting to know each other, we used to meet up at Starbucks sometimes and play games. Lost Cities was one of our frequent picks. It’s a head to head, two player game in which both players are trying to outscore each other by laying down ascending runs of card suits on a small board between the two of them. There’s a theme laid over the mechanism (completing expeditions in the lost world) but it’s basically pasted on and so that is the last we will speak of it. So there we were, newly in love, eyeing each other across the table, smiling and flirting, and doing our best to beat one another at Lost Cities . It was awesome. And now, with the roll & write genre having made an impressive rebound a few years ago (let’s not forget the mechanism has actually been around since the 50s with Yatzee ), Knizia has ported his award winning game Lost Cities into this format, releasi

Board Game Review: Hues and Cues

Last week we received Hues and Cues from The Op Games. We recently finished playing through Scooby-Doo Escape from the Haunted Mansion (a fantastic game in The Op Games catalogue designed by Jay Cormier, Sen-Foong Lim, and Kami Mandell that you should absolutely pick up to play with your family) and wanted to give another game from the same publisher a go. I picked Hues and Cues because I’ve been pleasantly surprised by other “test whether our minds think the same way” games such as The Mind and Wavelength. In Hues and Cues , players gather around a large central board comprised of 480 graduating colors of the rainbow surrounded by an x-y axis and scoring table. White and black (which are technically not colors) are conspicuously absent as are shades (mixtures of color + black; e.g., grey) and tints (mixtures of color + white; e.g., cream). On each player’s turn, they draw a card with four colors and the x-y axis codes of those colors depicted and they select one. They are in the

Board Game Review: Brass Birmingham

Here’s a story of a lovely lady (spoiler: it’s me) and her pride and how it has led to the discovery of the single greatest board game I have ever played. It’s probably also a good primer for other reviewers on increasing your reach. At GenCon this year, I was perusing the wares of the various booths and my eyes caught a glimpse of two beautiful game boxes. Each had crisp metallic lettering with an old world feel and artwork that radiated European class. I made my way to the booth and waited patiently to speak to to the team manning it as there were many buyers lined up to purchase the games. I didn’t know anything about the games (Brass Birmingham and Brass Lancashire), or the publisher – Roxley Game Laboratory – but I knew I wanted to review one or both of the games. Almost every board game love story I star in in can be summed up this way: I am seduced by the artwork or theme and then I stay for the right mechanics. When the lead rep spoke with me, he gently rejected my request. He