If this was going to appear on a menu it would read: Pine Nut Encrusted Salmon with Cerely Root, Parsnip, Cucumber Salsa, on Wasabi Buttered Somen.
Okay, so it’s not technically a salsa, but it was damn good.
I bought one of those big slabs of salmon that are always on sale at Dominick’s, and while not the greatest quality, they’re still very tasty. The salmon is the ‘meat’ of the dish, but the earthy and snappy, but slightly crisp and cool salsa, is an awesome compliment. The somen, buttered with wasabi and ground pine nuts gives the dish a satisfying fullness. Something about this dish seems very healthy too.
1 celery root, peeled and cubed
1 medium sized parsnip, peeled and cubed
1 cucumber, peeled and cubed
7-8 oz. cut of salmon
2-3 T pine nuts
white wine or mirin
wasabi (either tubed or dry made into paste would work)
2 T butter
rice flour (arrowroot would be a good substitute)
somen
First I prepped the root veggies, peeling and dicing the celery root and parsnip, boiling them separately until just soft. The parsnip takes a bit longer, which is why I did them in separate pans.
Meanwhile, in a dry saute pan, I toasted some pine nuts. Pay close attention and move them aorund constantly when you do this, because burned pine nuts are unusable. I just browned them slightly, then ground them quickly, in a small food processor. I cut 2 good size pieces (6-7 ozs each) from the salmon slab and coated it with the ground nuts and a little salt. Since pine nuts are oily and moist, don’t expect an honest-to-goodness ‘crust’. Dry roasting the nuts in an oven first might give you a crunchier crust, but I really just wanted a brown coating. The salmon went skin side down into a very hot non-stick pan, and then was browned on all sides. Now a purist would finish the fish in an oven, but the nasty secret is that finishing the cooking in a microwave is the best way to cook the fish all the way through, without drying it out, overcooking the outside or steaming the crust into mush. I just put the fish on a plate and gave it a minute in a regularly powered microwave. Microwave cooking is tricky, and is better done in stages, each stage under a minute, checking by feel and heat each time.
While the fish is cooking, the salsa is browned just slightly in a hot pan, adding cubed cucumbers at the last minute.
The wasabi butter was just a bit of butter, a tiny bit of rice flour, a shot of wine (a had a bottle of Black Swan Chardonnay, a pineapply Aussie, on sale for about 5 bucks), a couple of pinches of left over ground pine nut, and about two inches squeezed from a tube of wasabi, sauteed a bit until the flour was cooked. The somen (very thin noodles) only take about three minutes in boiling water. The somen goes into a bowl, mixed with some of the wasabi butter, the fish goes on top, followed by another sprinkle of wasabi butter, followed by the side of cubed veggies piled around.