Happiness is my latest pie, a dilled salmon potato

Dilled Salmon Potato Pie

28 oz cooked salmon, flaked (I used canned, boneless, skinless, Atlantic, drained)

2 lbs Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled, boiled, mashed

2 eggs, beaten 

1/2 stick salted butter

1/4 yellow onion diced

1 T sea salt for the potato water plus 1/2 tsp for seasoning

1 handful fresh dill fronds, chopped

1/2 lemon 

 

1- Set the oven to bake at 425F.

2- Start the water on the boil; peel and quarter the potatoes; boil covered by water salted with 1 T salt, about 20 minutes to fork tender; remove to a bowl and mash with a potato masher, plain, and let cool.

3- Meanwhile, dice the onions; melt the butter in a skillet and gently saute the onions until transparent, and set aside to cool.

4- Drain the salmon and flake it; add salmon to the potatoes, mashing in until thoroughly distributed.

5- Add the butter and sauteed onions to the potatoes and mash. Season with 1/2 tsp salt.

6- Chop the dill and mash it in.

7- Squeeze one half lemon with your hands over the mixture and mash.

8- Add the beaten eggs and mash.

9- Turn out the mixture into a large pie pan, sculpt until level, and bake in the middle of the pre-heated oven 42 minutes until golden brown on the top, because 42 is the answer to everything.

10- Let cool 5-10 minutes, slice and serve on warm plates with a fresh vegetable or a side salad.

 

Makes eight servings.

 

Two slices will stuff you with seven ounces of salmon, which is 40% of the US RDA for protein. You can fiddle with the quantity of salmon down, and the quantity of dill and lemon up, as desired. The last time I made this was with 21 oz of salmon and two slices seemed not quite enough at just over five ounces of salmon, even though it seemed to me that it should have been enough.

 

You could probably make salmon cakes with this, frying them in oil using one less egg and no lemon juice in the mixture to reduce the moisture content, since this is the bones of a Newfoundland cod cake recipe. But at the end of the day, I'd just rather shove it in the oven down here at 42.9704° N latitude.

 

IYKYK. 

 

 

 

 

 

   

Curried Basmati Salmon Cakes With Apricot Sauce

Of all the salmon cakes I've made, I like these the best.

The reason is simple. They are lighter and crispier than the cakes I make with whole oats, oat bran, bread crumbs and the like.

It's always laudable to combine as many healthy ingredients into one recipe as you can, but when the result is better with slightly fewer of those good things and which actually makes you prepare and eat the recipe more often, I say go for it.

Wild salmon is something you should eat as often as possible instead of red meats in order to improve your overall health, and I think this recipe will help you do that and add an important ingredient at the same time which we should all eat more often for health reasons, namely, curry powder, a powerful anti-inflammatory.

Curried Basmati Salmon Cakes With Apricot Sauce

1 egg beaten in a large bowl

1 T curry powder of your choosing

1 14.75 oz can wild Alaskan sockeye salmon, drained

1 cup already prepared white Royal Basmati rice from the foothills of the Himalayas, cooled

.5 cup sweetened coconut flakes

1. After you beat the egg in a large bowl, whisk in the curry powder.

2. Add the drained salmon and mash together with a potato masher.

3. Stir in the basmati rice and the flaked coconut, combining gently with the masher until thoroughly mixed.

4. Heat a generous amount of sesame or canola oil in a porcelainized dutch oven, such as a Le Creuset oval 3 quart.

5. Form the cakes using a smallish half inch deep lid from some container or other, pressing the mixture into the lid until firm. I use a rubber lid from a broken Leifheit food chopper I saved. It releases the cakes perfectly. Using it, I make seven patties from the ingredients.

6. Fry the cakes over medium high heat two minutes on a side. Use a slotted silicone spatula to lift and drain the cakes as you remove them, and keep on a serving plate in a warm oven.

Apricot Sauce

4 T salted butter

6 T best apricot jam

2 T fresh lemon juice

1. Melt the butter in a sauce pan over low heat.

2. Stir in the apricot jam and lemon juice at medium heat.

3. Cook and stir until thoroughly combined and slightly thickened and remove from heat.

4. Top each cake with some sauce and serve immediately with some petite steamed sweet peas, or a crisp green lettuce salad on the side.

Wunderbar!