How do you easily make a tasty meal loaded with healthy omega-3 fatty acids? And how do you make it in 12 minutes?
Let’s talk salmon baby!
A few days ago I wrote about what I eat for breakfast. If you read that you know that I believe health is one of the four most important things in life and that what you eat significantly affects your health.
But what should you eat for dinner to not only be healthy but to love eating it too?
Before I answer that I need to get something off my chest….
Fish used to give me nightmares!
Yes it’s true, I used to like fish as much as I enjoyed cleaning my toilet. Seriously.
I can remember several times when I faked a stomach bug when mum told us the great news: “fish for dinner everyone!”.
If you think that was bad think again. My sister was way worse. She used to pretend that she ate the fish our parents made when she was really doing was wrapping it up in tissue paper and throwing it in the garbage!
To this day she claims to be allergic to anything from the sea….
Anyway, over the last few years I’ve learnt how to make salmon taste good even for someone who isn’t naturally a big fish-lover.
That means everyone can do it as I suck at cooking!
Salmon is very healthy and takes 12 minutes to make
Salmon is full of omega-3s (about 2,5 gram pr 100 gram serving), vitamins (especially B3, B6, B12) and minerals (especially phosphorus and selenium).
Luckily, salmon is also dead easy to make and done right it tastes great!
How I made salmon today
I recommend eating about 200g of salmon once a week. Here’s what you need to make a nice salmon meal (for 1 person):
- 200 gram salmon filet (I prefer to buy it without skin)
- 150 gram spinach
- 100 gram white mushrooms
This is exactly how I made this salmon dish today
- Put the frying pan on high heat and put lots of butter in it (about two spoons)
- Chop the mushrooms. I put them all on the chopping board and just hammer my knife all over them! Kristina is not fond of my approach but I’m done in 20 seconds…
- Fry the mushrooms for about 3 minutes and add lots of salt and pepper
- Put the mushrooms on your plate, then throw another spoon of butter into the frying pan and chuck all the spinach in
- Fry the spinach for 2 minutes. While frying it, add salt and pepper to one side of the salmon
- Put the spinach on your plate, then throw another 2 spoons of butter into the frying pan and put the salmon with the salt & pepper side down in too
- Fry the salmon for about 3 minutes. Put salt & pepper on the top of the salmon
- Turn the salmon over and fry it for another three minutes
- Jump up and down three times while shouting “I’m a saaaaaalmoooon!”
- Eat and enjoy
I don’t know about you but in my opinion cooking doesn’t get much easier than that!
If you’re more of a chef than I am you might want to make a sauce. Kristina made Hollandais sauce for us today which was nice but that definitely isn’t required.
And that’s it! There’s nothing more to it :)
What I want you to do
Start tomorrow by making sure you have the required foods.
Then make this dinner for yourself and your family. If you make the salmon like this your kids will not fake a stomach bug or throw what you made in the garbage!
Love from Oslo,
Bjarte
http://www.dagsavisen.no/nye-inntrykk/reportasje/den-rode-fare_1/
(The article above is in Norweigan).
It’s rare that I read anything the general media has to say about health. My advice is to ignore the media as they do way more harm than good with their generally poor advice.
Having said that I think this article is better than most. With regards to farmed vs. fished salmon I definitely agree that freshly caught salmon is better than farmed.
What’s your perspective on farmed salmon guys?
This looks delicious! I’ve only ever grilled my salmon with lemon so it’s high time I tried something new. Hollandaise sauce intimidates me but that looks so good I’m going to have to just dive in and try.
With respect to farmed vs wild, I have seen so many studies talking about the health concerns of farmed salmon (PCB levels, the low quality feed that they are given). We can give the same concerns about grain fed beef and chicken. We aren’t going to have as high of a quality of a product when we feed an animal something that they haven’t evolved to process (which is why we all have switched our diets) and that’s not even taking into account the levels of contamination found in the fish whether you’re in Europe or America. If you can get wild salmon, grab it up! That’s my two cents :)
Nice Ellie! There’s also a significant difference in regulation between different countries which affect the quality of the farmed fish, chicken, beef, lamb, pork and so forth.
Generally, I think the food quality in Norway is of greater quality than in the US for example.
Agreed, definitely a large difference across the board in regulation. If only we could all get on the same (correct) page. I am in awe of the things that get by here sometimes. Feed prices went up for cows last fall due to a drought and farmers were adding candy to the corn they feed to their cows to stretch their corn supply. I hope they aren’t allowed to do that in Europe, because it is absurd!
I came across this study: http://www.albany.edu/ihe/salmonstudy/summary.html. I didn’t dive into it much, but it does appear to be a rather large study across both Americas as well as Europe. Troubling, it does seem that European farmed salmon had higher levels of contamination, even in Oslo (the only sampled Norwegian market). They only took three samples per market, so they may have just grabbed a bad fish for it. It is also only one study!
Interesting stuff. There are even some data that suggest in some cases that farmed salmon (at least in Norway) contain less pesticides than wild fish!
For me this question is about what we optimize for. I think health is crucial hence the importance of salmon in the diet. Would the perfect salmon be best? Yes, but what about factors as availability, cost ($ & time) etc?
Personally I think we should optimize for life instead of optimize for the ideal food :)
Indeed. At a certain point, we could drive ourselves crazy achieving perfection, and have to just live sometimes! Thanks for the discussion!
Likewise Ellie :)
I was so uninspired to cook today and then saw your post! We had this (minus the hollandais) and with the addition of some sugar snap peas! absolutely delish! thanks!
I’m delighted to hear that Rebecca! Well done and I’m glad the dinner was a success :)
Hi Bjarte
Thank you for your blog – I like it a lot.
I recommend for you and everybody else to AVOID salmon coming from farms but to ALWAYS choose wild salmon. I saw an interesting but frightening french documentary on (norwegian) farmed fish. At some of these farms they apparently feed the fish some very hazardous feed as well as a lot of medicine!!
Hi Morten, thanks for your comment. I think the issue of salmon is complex. If you have any links to material you trust I would be interested in checking it out.
Regards from Brazil,
Bjarte