recipe - grilled salmon and assorted veg

One of our resident cooks, John Clayton creates a great meal for you and your kids of grilled salmon and assorted veg

Grilled Salmon and Assorted Veg

Finding new ways to get the 5-a-day down your offspring can be an interesting challenge.  This recipe will do all of that and more.  If your kids don’t like salmon (or the idea of salmon), substitute chicken breasts instead.  End to end, should take about half an hour.  40 minutes tops.

Ingredients

• Salmon steaks.  1 per adult plus 1 per 2 kids or part thereof.
• Vegetables, assorted.  This time, I used:
  Sweet potato (1)
  Potatos (2)
  Tomatos (4)
  Peppers (1 each of red, green and yellow)

But you can use anything that roasts.  Carrots work surprisingly well, as do leeks, butternut squash, courgettes, aubergines…  Get the kids involved in the shopping here, ask them to choose the veg they’d like to eat (and add in a couple you know they’re not over-fond of).

• Olive oil, salt, pepper, sugar
• Mayonnaise (You can either buy this or, if you’ve got an electric hand blender, make it yourself.  It really isn’t difficult and you can impress your friends with this trick!) - You’ll need an egg, vegetable oil, wine vinegar, salt and pepper, mustard powder.

Preparation

• Chop the veg into chunks.  Cubes of about an inch, inch-wide strips of pepper, halve the tomatoes.

• Sprinkle salt onto a chopping board ready to put the salmon skin-side down onto, put the oven to 200°C and the grill on.

• Drizzle olive oil onto the vegetables, sprinkle salt and pepper over the lot.  My trick with tomatoes is to add a pinch of sugar to the centre.  Works like a charm.

The hard work

• When the oven is up to speed, put the tray of vegetables onto the middle shelf.  Give yourself 10 minutes on a timer and then ignore them.
• Put the salmon for the kids skin-side down on the salt and press firmly to make sure it sticks to the skin.

• If you’ve got salmon steaks cut across the fish (U-shaped, skin around the outside), roll the steak in the salt making sure all the skin gets some.
• Add more salt to the board ready to do the salmon for the adults.  If you want to add some heat, add 1tsp chilli powder and 2tsp ground ginger, mix thoroughly and then coat the skin as before.

• Put the salmon onto the grill tray and cook for about 10 minutes, skin-side down.
• After the first 10 minutes for the veg, open the oven and give them a poke with a fish-slice, just to move them around and stop everything from sticking.

• Once you’ve done that, the ten minutes for the salmon should be up, so turn the salmon steaks over and finish them off skin-side up.  If your steaks have skin all round, just turn them over.
• Right.  Mayonnaise.  You can buy it, but it’s good fun to make and your kids will be amazed at the transformation.
  Crack an egg into the mixing jug that goes with the hand blender.
  Add a tablespoon of wine vinegar
  Top up to the 200ml mark with vegetable oil.
  Add a pinch of salt, a few grates of pepper and a teaspoon of mustard powder
  Now’s the trick.  Put the hand blender in right down to the bottom but don’t turn it on yet.  Once it’s at the bottom, switch it on and raise it slowly.
  
  Et voila!  Instant mayonnaise.
• Take the veg out of the oven, take the salmon out from the grill, switch everything off and serve.  If you add ketchup to the mayo you get a very fetching pink sauce that my kids would happily eat as one of their 5-a-day if they could.

Thanks to John Clayton for this recipe. Follow John on twitter @dogbombs