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Salmon with Lentils

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I’ve been asked for quick weeknight recipes and while this one involves a little chopping, I think it falls into that category.
Salmon has to be the week night cook’s best friend.  It’s fast, it can undergo many disguises and it’s good for you. It’s important, however, to buy wild-caught salmon and avoid farm-raised fish.  Farm-raised salmon, like all farm-raised fish, negativey impact the environment in numerous ways – pollution, chemicals, parasites and non-native farmed fish that escape from salmon farms–all affect the natural habitat and the native salmon in the surrounding waters.  Now I realize there’s a price difference and last time I looked at Fairway it was a sizeable one.  But use your conscience as well as your calculator.
Alaskan wild salmon is probably among the best managed species in the world with both the fish population and the fisheries themselves monitored constantly.  The abundance of fish is proof of how well Alaska’s management has succeeded.
Getting off the soap box, today’s salmon dish is a riff on one Ina Garten published in 2004’s “Barefoot in Paris” cookbook.  Our basic changes the recipe involved adding considerably more vegetables to the lentils that are its most important ingredient.  We make a warm lentil salad with more carrots and celery, onions and leeks than Ina’s original. We also do the whole dinner on top of the stove: Ina called for a spell in a hot oven but we couldn’t control the internal temperature of the fish that way so we choose to sauté the fish. We also found that Ina’s cooking time for the lentils was very ambitious so we cook them longer than she did.  Whatever our changes, we think you’ll see what kind of a winner Ina discovered. It’s easy, delicious and perfect on a weeknight.  Here’s the recipe:

 



3 thoughts on “Salmon with Lentils”

  • I love this recipe but it did seem to take me longer than I thought it would. I had my in- laws for dinner and I thought they would love the lentils but they seemed very suspicious of them.

    Andrew's sister

  • Then your oven isn't right i do this recipe as Ina does and my salmon is cooked to perfect, and you could have mention she made this dish for me at my store!!
    XXX
    M

  • It saves energy to use the stove top and I must say that you have a lot less control in an oven than you do stovetop but if you are cooking a quantity of this dish, the oven may be your best friend. Mine wasn't.

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