Salmon - Grilled with Lemon & EVOO & . . .

Gather together a few simple ingredients, follow these steps, emerge with something stupendous!

The ingredients of this stupendous meal, in addition to the salmon, are as follows:

- extra virgin olive oil (EVOO), - soy sauce, - lemon, - vegetable stock, - hot sauce, [Not shown: coarse ground pepper in a mill; and capers].. The tomato is a useful accompaniment. (For EVOO, click here).

The salmon here is not only boneless but skinless. Skin is ok, and some may prefer having it: if you do, when you grill it, put the non skin side down first. Then when you turn it, and finish the grilling, the fillet is easier to remove from the grill because the spatula glides easily between skin (which sticks less to the grill) and the metal of the grill due to the fact that the skin is firmer and sticks less.

Grilled salmon with lemon, extra virgin olive oil, and other good things -- here we come.

Before we go, though, it should be noted that the battery of cuisine here is as follows: a reamer, a paring knife, tongs, and a strong metal spatula for the grill.

Add EVOO to the grilling pan. Follow by adding soy sauce -- the amount depends on your taste but is significantly less than the EVOO. Add a bit of vegetable stock.

Cut the lemon in half, get rid of any seeds, and ream both halves so that the juice is added to the marinade/sauce in the pan. Add some hot sauce, again to taste.

Plop an empty half of the lemon on the cutting board and proceed to pare off very thin pieces of the yellow (if any white is sliced off with the yellow, you have sliced a bit too deeply). These little pieces are called "zest," the zest of the lemon. They add flavor, so plop those little pieces into the sauce. They also add color.

Add some capers if you have them. Capers are the perfect accompaniment to olive oil. A little ground pepper in there wouldn't hurt, either, or maybe more than a little.

Rinse the fillets in cold water. Then plop them right into the sauce.

Halve the tomatoes (Romas in this case, but any tomato will do) and add them also, though the point here is not to cover them with sauce, but to use the pan as something to carry the tomatoes to the grill in.

Turn the fillets over so that both sides are briefly marinated/sauced.

Looks great, doesn't it?

This won't take long., assuming you have already fired up the grill and let it get up to grilling temperature.

Put the grilling pan up on the little shelf; that is necessary to get the sauce to boil and thus integrate the ingredients. (You do always preheat your grill, do you not?)

Spatula (or tong) out the salmon fillets onto the grill. Close the top of the grill. Cooking time depends on how thick the fillets are and how rare you like your salmon. (Remember that sushi and sashimi use raw salmon, which is delicious, so don't be afraid to give your salmon just a light grilling.) In this case, it was somewhere between a minute or two minutes on each side.

The fact that the salmon fillets are on the grill for such a short time helps with preventing them from sticking to the grill when we turn them over and when we are finally ready to remove them and put them back in pan.

That marinade/sauce on the top shelf will quickly start to sizzle, which is good, but we need to make sure that it doesn't sizzle away. Again, the short time the salmon fillets are on the grill helps prevent a disaster like that, but we always need to keep an eye on the sauce.

Wow!

Goes great with an arugula salad dressed with EVOO, red wine vinegar, some mustard, and a little soy -- whip all these together, dress the arugula, add coarse ground pepper from a mill.

Don't forget the glass of red wine. Merlot would be a good choice.

The vitamin section of your local store is chockablock with Fish Oil pills.

Here, however, is a chance to get the real thing, and it is much more delicious than a pill.

Most of the salmon eaten in the United States and in Europe comes from farmed salmon, that is, salmon grown as cultured fish in a controlled environment. The largest areas where this farming is done are in Chile, Norway, Scotland, Canada and the Faroe Islands, all countries in which wild capture in the ocean was once the major way of reaping the benefits of this very delicious fish. The value of the world’s farmed fish each year is said to be about $10 billion. This makes salmon the king of farmed fish, considerably ahead of tilapia, catfish, sea bass, carp and bream.

This farming of salmon is a complicated matter. Salmon feed on other fish, and for farmers to produce enough fish for them to feed on is difficult. It is said that salmon actually consume more fish -- "wild forage fish" -- by weight than they produce in their own bodies. The extraction of wild forage fish for salmon farming thus affects the survivability of the wild predator fish which rely on them for food.

Pictures, pictures, pictures

Series within series, actually. Food & Cooking, for example, then -- within that -- series on vegetables, fruits, seafood, meat, etc. Books, too. Ideas, too. Travel, too. Key virtues:. pictures, clear step-by-step text. Delicious -- whether foods or ideas! All of the series, and all of the items in each series, can be found, organized by floor, at this link: Lee White's Department Store. Happy shopping! -- everything is for free!

Real Meal. Unlike fancy food mags, where images are hyped and food itself is secondary, all pix shown here are from a real meal, prepared and eaten by me and my friends. No throwing anything away till perfection is achieved. This is the real deal --- a Real Meal.