The opposite of slow

Tonight's dinner was happily thrown together. After a lovely meeting at Southern Sun with a friend of mine for Stout Month, I was a little late for dinner. But my husband, awesome as he is, got it started while I was on my way home. I had queued up rice, asparagus and salmon, so I already had a plan...sort of.

Growing up, my favourite meal was barbecued salmon, a fresh salad with avocado, and fresh baked sourdough bread. I would spread butter and smash avocado on the bread, and smear ranch dressing from my salad all over my salmon. My mom really knew how to barbeque salmon and cooking it that way basically meant that no extra seasoning was required. Or maybe she just didn't want to and since the family was satisfied, why change it? Whatever. It is seriously delicious that way.

But we don't have a barbecue or grill, so we don't have a way to get that excellent smoky flavour into our fish. On my drive home I realized baked salmon was going to be pretty boring if I didn't use my spice rack. A quick search for "basic salmon recipe" saved the day. I found this blackened salmon recipe from Real Simple (without even trying to get something from there again) and whipped it together while hubby worked on the rice and asparagus.

Blackened salmon sounds so fancy. But what I learned tonight is that "blackened" is really just searing the spices (which produced a lot of cayenne pepper smoke in my kitchen and had us both in coughing fits) until the fish is black on the outside. I baked the salmon about 5 minutes longer than called for, since it was still pink when I checked it after 8 minutes. Maybe my fillets were a bit thick.

Blackened salmon = blackened pan. 

So minus the part where I didn't meet my cooking slow goal at all tonight, dinner turned out great! The salmon had a kick to it, but the seasoning mix didn't overpower the fish flavour. We put just a little zesty orange sauce on the rice, which complimented the spices, and dressed up the asparagus with lemon pepper. I'm pretty darn pleased with our result. I don't even think my pre-dinner stout is clouding my opinion.

A pretty picture of asparagus. 

Dinner is served! Delicious and healthy!