Honey-Peppered Salmon, Honey

This week's nueva receta was for our anniversary dinner, so we turned of course to a few of the more romantic titles in our cook-book book case. And since it was on a Friday after my Thursday rowing, we looked for seafood recipes.

While I was looking through Booty Food (yes, that is a real book), Pam found a simple recipe in our early edition of InterCourses. Regular readers of this blog will know that both are full of delicious and delectable ideas for cooking together. In this case, Pam found a very simple recipe for salmon that I was able to prepare on my own with minimal effort.

Honey-Peppered Salmon starts with salmon steaks, which I purchased at Kyler's Catch. On Friday evening, I simply whisked together the following in a flat-bottomed bowl:

• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 1 T honey
• 2 T Dijon mustard
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 t cayenne pepper
• 1/2 t dried cilantro (the recipe calls for ground coriander)
• 2 T lemon

We had been invited to festivities on campus, and I should have prepared this marinade before heading out, but it worked out well anyway, since this was easy to prepare and required leaving the salmon steaks in this marinade for only 30 minutes, at room temperature.

The recipe calls for baking the fish, 6-7 minutes on each side, at 350. I had started with a cold oven, so it was going a bit slowly. So after about a dozen minutes, I turned on the broiler. The result was a delicious, slightly caramelized glaze -- hot and sweet! We will definitely try this again.

These sweet, peppery steaks brought out the very best in an ordinary Shiraz from Yellow Tail.