Welcome to the second edition of “Anything but Q-Side!” Today we’re going to ramp up the fancy a bit and tackle something a TINY bit more difficult. Today we will be cooking baked salmon! Now before you panic, cooking salmon is much easier than you would think. There aren’t many steps or ingredients, and it will only take you about 20-30 minutes. Plus, salmon is packed with protein and other nutritious goodies that will keep you burning through those long nights of “studying”. So without further ado, here is my take on a baked lemon salmon!
Ingredients:
1 lemon
2 cloves of garlic, minced
2 tsp salt
1 Tbsp black pepper
1/2 Tbsp salted/unsalted butter
1 Salmon fillet
The first thing to do is to pre-heat the over to 400 degrees. Next, take that beautiful piece of salmon out of the packaging. Most come pre-deboned so there’s no need to worry about that. Place that salmon on a sheet of aluminum foil about 12″x12″. Next step is to cut that lemon in half and set aside half of it for now.
Squeeze that half lemon onto the fillet. A good tip to get all the juices out of a lemon is to microwave the lemon for about 20 seconds. It softens the peel quite a bit and makes for a much easier squeeze. Once you’re done squeezing the lemon, add the salt and pepper evenly to the fillet.
Take the other half of the lemon and cut 3-4 slices of lemon about 1/4 inch thick. Place them in a row on the aluminum foil and place the salmon on top of the lemons, enough to cover the whole bottom of the salmon (it’s okay if there’s more lemon than salmon).
Then pour the lemon salt pepper mixture onto the salmon on the foil. Make sure to pour carefully as to keep all the juices on top of and around the salmon.
The last step is to add a the 1/2 tbsp of butter on top of the piece of salmon and if you have any extra lemon slices, throw one on top of the butter, along with the minced garlic.
And that’s it! Just fold up the foil over the salmon to seal in all the juices and so that nothing leaks out of the foil. Cooking salmon in foil allows the juices to stay sealed up inside. Especially since salmon is so easily overcooked and dried out, wrapping it in foil makes it much more likely that you’ll get juicy salmon.
Place it in the oven and cook for 25 minutes.
Take it out of the packet carefully and plate! It goes great with light oil pastas like aglio e olio. Now get to cooking!
This looks really good! I’ve only ever cooked salmon with teriyaki sauce. Looking forward to trying this.
What are the green sprigs? Are those chives? Thyme?
It’s perfect for my special dinner, Thank you..