Weekday Meals

Weekdays are a busy time for me, and it's easy to get into a habit of eating fast food, frozen food, or take-out food. When time and energy are at a premium, the goodness of your food can get sacrificed. Now, I'm not saying to stop getting those Cane's chicken fingers on the way home from work - just that 3 times a week is probably too many.

I left school at 6:35 today. I was already pretty hungry!

My favorite easy and quick recipe is one my mom used to make all the time - baked salmon plus some sort of vegetable. The words baked salmon even as I write them bring up thoughts of hard, flavorless, dried out fish at a potluck buffet line, because people don't know how to treat a fish right. I don't think I ever connoted my mom's salmon with that monstrosity, but "baked" is quite literally the method of cooking involved, so I'm not sure what else to call it.

Yummy Salmon

Things you should just have in your kitchen

• soy sauce
• fresh garlic (you can buy a big bag of this - they last for 3-6 months in bulb form)
• ginger root
• sesame oil
• butter
• salt
• pepper
• olive oil
• aluminum foil
• baking sheet

Things to pick up at the grocery store

• Salmon fillet (just eyeball how much you think you'll eat; I usually eat about half a pound by myself, but it's nice to have some leftovers too)

A note on what type of salmon to buy:

People get really intense about what type of salmon to buy. Especially people from the Pacific Northwest. In most places, though, you might only have one or two choices of what type of salmon to buy. If you're cooking for someone who's going to raise a fuss about you making farm-raised "Atlantic" salmon (and they put hand quotes around the Atlantic part as a preface to informing you that "Atlantic" salmon isn't a real thing), I suggest you disown that person and cook for someone else. This is about a quick weekday meal, so don't go spending $35 on wild Alaskan king salmon. Just chill out.

Note #2:

As I was glancing back over this I thought I had written "drown" instead of "disown". Either one is acceptable.

• white wine (I usually buy a $10 bottle and use part of it for cooking and the rest of it for drinking; you could also just use some white cooking wine that you keep in the kitchen and it would work just fine)
• a lemon (you could use lemon juice that you have in your kitchen, but you have to go to the grocery store to pick up the salmon anyway, might as well get a fresh one)
• some sort of vegetable that doesn't take too long to cook (I like broccoli with the salmon)

When I got home I realized I still had some of that same wine in the fridge. Sigh.

When you get home

Why I can't add a picture in the middle of a numbered list without having the numbers restart at 1, I will never understand.

1. Put the oven at 400 degrees.
2. Make an aluminum foil boat by folding up the edges of the foil - there's going to be some liquid involved so the boat part is just to make sure it doesn't spill out of the foil. It also helps because you don't really get anything on the baking sheet so usually a quick rinse is enough to clean it.
3. Wash the salmon fillet. I just run some cold water over and use a knife to get off any remaining scales that the fish counter didn't get (they never get them all if you just get it from a regular grocery store). If you're one of those weirdos that doesn't eat the skin, I guess you can leave the scales on.
4. Pat the fish dry with paper towels and plop it in the middle of your foil boat.
5. Add soy sauce (1/4 cup), white wine (2 tbsp), sesame oil (1 tsp), the juice of one lemon, and season both sides of the fish with salt and pepper. The amounts in parentheses are approximate and probably depend on the size of the fish and stuff. I've never measured because it's a week day and who has time to get those things out and then wash them afterward??
6. Smash some garlic and remove the peel. Chop up some ginger root into pieces. The pieces should be large enough to brush off the fish when you're done cooking, because aside from my girlfriend, nobody likes eating a chunk of unexpected ginger. Arrange the garlic and ginger on top of the fish in a roughly uniform distribution.
7. Cut up a few chunks of butter and arrange on top of the fish as well.
8. If there's a part of the fish that's a lot thinner than another part of the fish, cover up the thin bit with aluminum foil so it doesn't overcook and dry out like the gross buffet fish.
9. Stick the fish in the oven for about 20 minutes, or until it seems done on the inside.
10. While the fish is in the oven, smash up some more garlic and cut it up finely.
11. Heat up some olive oil in a pan or wok on medium heat and throw the garlic in there.
12. Right before the garlic starts turning brown, throw your veggies in there. Season with some salt and pepper. Stir it around a bit. Then add about a quarter cup (???) of water and cover it to let it steam.
13. There are some other things you could do to the veggies at this point but we can save that for a weekend meal. This will do just fine for the weekday. Cook the veggies until they're as done as you want them.
14. Take the salmon out of the oven. Turn the oven off. At this point my mom always used to put some green onions on top of the salmon. I always forget to buy this from the grocery store and even when I do remember I end up with way too much to use in a timely manner. Although sometimes I have some from the onions that started sprouting because I forgot about them.
15. Eat the salmon and the veggies. Drink the wine.
16. This also tastes good with some white rice, but we're trying to cut down on carbs.

Million-dollar idea: Breed a strain of broccoli that doesn't have a stalk.
Alice: "I like the stalk."
Kevin: "You're lying to yourself."

The pictures above correspond to steps 11-13

While you're waiting for the veggies to cook, enjoy some of that white wine.

Dig into the thickest part of the salmon with a fork to check for doneness.

At this point I was too hungry to care about plating.

A pleasant September evening = outdoor dining.

One hour after I left school I was dining on a delicious, healthy meal.

Enough left over for lunch tomorrow!

Clean up

All you really used was the baking sheet, which was lined with aluminum foil and might be completely clean, whatever you used to cook the veggies, a knife and chopping board, and your plate and utensils. If you were by yourself you quite possibly didn't even use a plate. This can be cleaned in a few minutes.

This meal usually requires a ten-minute trip to the grocery store after work, half an hour of cooking, twenty minutes of eating, and ten minutes of cleanup. It can easily be scaled to feed more or fewer people. If you use a really big piece of fish it might take more than 20 minutes.