Slow Baked Salmon

My parents came down yesterday. Everyone but me loves salmon so I decided to fix that, plus it went with my kid-oriented Valentine theme of pink and red. I also had red potatoes, hearts of palm salad, and asparagus. Okay, the asparagus sort of blew the theme but we all love it. The girls had the day off school and baked a cake with pink frosting for dessert and I bought some strawberry ice cream to go with it. All in all, a wonderful meal with wonderful company! (Hi Mom!)

Slow cooked salmon

My mom cooks salmon much more often than I do so I was a bit nervous. In the past, I’ve poached it or barbecued it and made my mom’s mango-salsa that I love, or poached salmon in soy sauce.

The last time I cooked salmon I’d noted Jacques Pepin’s slow cook method and noted it in my mental list of “want to try.” Last night, I did, skipping his salsa-Mayo based dressing but following slow cooked method of baking the salmon at 200 degrees F, although I forgot to put his herbs on at the end. This was delicious! Even I liked it!

• salmon filet(s)
• salt and pepper
• bread crumbs with hazelnuts

I took some whole grain bread and put it in the food processor with some hazelnuts I had in the freezer, that my sister and I had picked up at Trader Joe’s a while ago. Pepin’s web site says you can cook this on your serving platter, due to the low oven temperature, but I didn’t have a serving platter large enough, so we did it on a jelly roll pan covered with some foil.

I preheated the oven to 200 while I rubbed the foil with some olive oil, put the salmon skin-side down, sprinkled with salt and pepper and put the bread crumb-hazelnut mixture on top. I popped the pan in the oven and went and sat in the living room with a glass of wine and visited with my parents for a while. Part of what attracted me to this recipe was the idea of being able to do prep work ahead of time and then visit with guests! Jacques says to cook it for 45 minutes but it was still a touch rare for our tastes at that point so we cooked it another 20 minutes or so while microwaving the red potatoes, cooking up the asparagus, and making the salad.

We also mixed up some mayonnaise, lemon juice, and capers for the salmon. We ate a lot of salmon and it was really good! Of course, I bought too much, always preferring to be forced into creativity with leftovers than not have enough food. Tonight I made salmon cakes with the leftovers and they were great also. Perhaps, the salmon itself (fresh Pacific) was especially good because I just ate salmon for dinner two nights in a row and loved it both nights.