Salmon Saturday

The second part of our eve of Tour De France meal was a dish that I had not cooked for a while and was long overdue pride of place on my menu- roast salmon. This was a dish that had first came to my attention as a young child when I saw an advert on the TV which extolled the virtues of roasted Salmon Steaks with a side helping of watercress mixed with yoghurt.

For my dish however I substituted salmon steaks with salmon fillets. The reason for this was that salmon steaks tend to be festooned with bones and you spend half your time picking the bones out of the steaks which in turn detracts from the taste experience of the salmon.

The album of choice for cooking which I had earlier in the day picked up second hand from Poundland, ironically for the sum of £2.00, was Radiohead's patchy 1993 debut "Pablo Honey". Although some of the tracks clearly illustrate that the band was still finding its feet before having a tilt at greatness, the melodic singing and biting guitar of "You", the evergreen "Creep" and the confident, surging "Anyone Can Play Guitar," show that some of the ingredients of their classic second album "The Bends" were already in place. Funnily the enough the album was released around the same time that I saw the advert for the salmon steaks.

I prepared the fillets by putting them on a foil sheet and sprinkling fresh Thyme on them and thick circular slices of red onion as well as the juice from a whole lemon. I then wrapped the salmon in a foil parcel and left it to one side while I prepared some new potatoes. The trick with new potatoes is not to peel them fully but instead to cut out any black or brown bits and then wash them thoroughly. Once the potatoes had been prepared I boiled them on the hob with fresh mint to give them a fresh flavour of summer.

While the potatoes were cooking on the hob I cooked the salmon in the oven for twenty minutes at 180 degrees,or more like 170 degrees with a fan oven. I also prepared the watercress by first washing it thoroughly and then adding it to a bowl with a tub of low fat, plain Greek Yoghurt. In readiness for the meal I put the bowl of watercress on the dining table next to the bottle of Bordeaux red wine.

Next I sliced finely five shallots, after first topping and tailing them, and cooked them lightly in five ounces of melted margarine. After the shallots had softened slightly I sliced thinly two ounces of spinach leaves and added them to the margarine and shallots. The spinach soon shrank and became part of the mixture which meant the spinach butter sauce, as I dubbed it, was ready.

I served the salmon with red onions and the lemon by splitting it between two dinner plates. I then added the sauce exclusively to the salmon and kept the potatoes and spinach on a separate part of the plate. The reason for this was that the spinach and potatoes, as a result of the mint, had a very fresh taste which contrasted with the rich taste of the salmon and the sauce. Certainly the mint and spinach helped us cool down from the high temperature caused by the Mediterranean- like weather while we were consuming the delicious salmon.

Together with the French Onion Soup this meal served to set us up well for the following day's unique opportunity to see the Tour De France first hand as it passed through a nearby village and got us in the mood for the Tour De France themed barbeque afterwards.

Just like on TV twenty years ago but without although the bones in the fish