Oh my lovely! Grilled salmon Asian salad

Whenever I have the privilege of having some fresh salmon fillets in my fridge, I always feel anxious. Such gorgeous pieces of meet, not cheap, are sitting there like diamonds in the rough. I can imagine how a jeweler feels with a priceless gem, wondering how best to cut it.

It being January, salad has not been on the menu for a long while, and even veggies have been hard to spot in our household lately. A healthy combination like spinach and salmon seemed to be in order (especially since our family is recovering from a series of colds and flus and could use some good vitamins).

I'm not a big salad fan, but let's just say this...I put some leftovers in a container to take for lunch the next day and they didn't make it past 8 PM.

And, to be honest, this is one of my FAVOURITE recipes that I've posted so far.

So here it is...

Salad:

A couple handfuls of baby spinach
1 orange bell pepper thinly sliced
2 green onions thinly sliced
zest of 1/2 lime
1 finely chopped chili
small handful of chopped cilantro (or coriander if you're anywhere else except Canada and the US)
enoki mushrooms (lovely tiny mushrooms that go lovely in Asian salads)

Dress the salad with a good lug of sesame oil and the juice of the 1/2 lime. Oh groan. Just listing out the ingredients is making my mouth water. Good simply on it's own. However....

Grilled salmon:

Mix:

1/4 soy sauce
1/4 brown sugar
2-3 tsp rice wine vinegar (mine expired, so I used white wine vinegar, and it still tasted great)

Taste the sauce to make sure you have a good balance of salty, sweet, and acidic.
Marinate the salmon fillets in the sauce. I did this while preparing the salad, so it was only about 10 minutes or so, but seemed to be sufficient.

On medium heat, add 1-2 TBSP of sesame oil with 1-2 TBSP of olive oil. Sesame oil gives the salmon a super flavour, but a) it burns quickly, so some olive oil is needed, and b) the flavour seems to burn off a bit, which is why I dressed the salad with sesame oil as well.

Grill the salmon fillets on medium. Pour any extra sauce over the fillets while you are grilling them. I HATE overdone salmon, so remember that your salmon fillets CAN be slightly pink in the middle (like a steak) without risk (CAVEAT: IF you get them at a good store. I'm not responsible for any food poisoning if you buy them half-rotten at a crap shop!). This makes the salmon so juicy and flaky, that it just falls apart in your mouth like melting butter. Wow.

Once the salmon is done, if you have any sticky sauce left in the pan, deglaze it with some lime juice and pour it over the fillets once you've placed them on the salad. A nice extra would be to sprinkle sesame seeds on the salmon, but I didn't think of it at the time. :(