Mustard-Maple Salmon ~~ White Rice ~~ Green Beans with Garlic ~~ Pumpkin Muffins
For this week’s swap I tried fish for the first time. I bought frozen salmon and kept it frozen right up until loading into Shalinee’s cooler. I was happy to hear from Shalinee that it actually stayed frozen. We have now experimented twice with seafood for swap. I think that as long as the weather is on the cooler side (i.e., not the heat of late-spring-summer-early-fall), seafood can work quite well for the swap.
Anyway… this dinner is one of our old-time favorites. I don’t remember when I started making this. I do remember that I originally found the salmon recipe years ago in a Cooking Light magazine (for years I subscribed to that magazine). I’m not sure which issue it was because I eventually lost it. But in 2002 I managed to find the recipe online at CookingLight.com. So I know we’ve been eating this since at least then— it is salmon with a mustard-maple marinade/glaze. It is a very intense flavor, so I always serve it with plain white rice to sort of counter-balance the strong flavors of the salmon. And I usually serve it with fresh spinach sautéed with garlic, olive oil, and salt. Since I knew the spinach would not hold up well for the swap, I made green beans instead (prepared the same way: simply sautéed with garlic, olive oil, and salt).
We also made pumpkin muffins this week to go with the dinner. The pumpkin muffin recipe came from a blog reader, Haley, a few weeks ago when I posted in a swap post about making pumpkin muffins (the post, with Haley’s comment, appears here). Thank you for reading Haley, and thank you for the recipe!!! I wanted to try Haley’s pumpkin muffin recipe because it looked super, super, super easy. Braydon volunteered to make the muffins (he’s a much better baker than I am). At first we weren’t too impressed with these muffins, but they quickly grew on us, big time, and by a couple days into eating them they were completely gone. They were a huge hit with Kyle and Owen, who, by their request, were eating them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and ate almost all of them in less than two days. The recipe made a lot of muffins— we got about 3 dozen muffins out of it— although we gave Shalinee about 1/3 of them, that still means that K & O ate almost a dozen muffins each in less than 48 hours.
I have already posted the salmon recipe on the blog. It appears here, but I’m re-posting the recipe here:
Mustard-Maple Salmon
Ingredients:
3 tablespoon Dijon mustard
3 tablespoon maple syrup
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
4 (6 ounce) salmon fillets (about 1 inch thick)
cooking spray
Directions:
Combine first 5 ingredients in a large zip-top plastic bag; add salmon. Seal and marinate in refrigerator 20 minutes. Prepare grill or broiler. Remove salmon from bag, reserving the marinade. Place salmon on a grill rack or broiler pan coated with cooking spray, and cook for 6 minutes on each side or until the fish flakes easily when tested with a fork; baste salmon occasionally with the reserved marinade. NOTE: The salmon marinade will become a “glaze” by baking it… it can be drizzled over the salmon.
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Re: Shalinee’s dinner this week… We J-Ms generally truly enjoy anything that Shalinee makes, but it is a special treat whenever she makes us any Indian food. All five of us really liked the noodle dish this week. And the plantain chips were an added bonus (we love plantain chips!!!).
