My dear friend Michelle came up to visit from New York City. On Saturday night we stayed home and made a very simple (but delicious!) meal of salmon fillet with a miso marinade.

I bought two 7-8 inch long salmon fillets (around 0.5 kg) for three people. When I got home, I rubbed these down with salt and rinsed them in cold water to clean them. After letting them dry, I spread miso paste on both sides (the skin and the pink fillet). This is a simple marinade my mom taught me. Miso is a Japanese salty paste of fermented soy beans. It’s a popular soup base and works really well with salmon.

While this was marinading, I put some rice in the rice cooker (a mix of 2/3 Japanese sticky rice and 1/3 mixed wild rice and brown rice). We then prepared a salad – red leaf lettuce, thin tomato wedges, and thinly sliced red onion. The salad dressing we made goes really well with Asian/Japanese main dishes:

• 1 tbsp of fresh grated ginger
• 1 tbsp of fresh minced garlic
• 3 tbsp of lemon juice (approx – can use a light vinegar instead)
• 3 tbsp of soy sauce (approx)
• light olive oil

I’m actually not sure how much lemon, soy, and olive oil I used, but I would flavour to taste and make sure that there’s just enough olive oil to make your vinagrette spread over the lettuce. The dressing is tangy and slightly spicy from the ginger.

To cook the salmon, I heated some oil and fried both sides of the salmon, starting with the skin side. (TIP: the first fillet I cooked, I didn’t scrape off the miso – the miso paste actually burned quite quickly. Because the skin is dry and will almost deep fry in oil, it’s best to not have anything else on that side. The second fillet I cooked, I scraped off the miso, and it cooked a lot better.) When the edges of the fillet have changed from raw to pink, flip it over. It took 7-8 minutes on medium-high heat to cook through.

In honour of Michelle’s first trip to Canada, we had to have a Canadian brew! We bought a white beer called Blanche de Chambly (a Quebec brewery). It was quite good and went well with the fish! We later mixed some pomegranate juice with the beer and it was great!

(From L to R): Beer, Beer with Pomegranate Juice, Pomegranate Juice

Finally, for dessert, Phoebe brought home a box of discontinued Godiva chocolates that her manager had given to the employees because they were no longer being sold. Double-decker!

No, we didn’t finish it all in one night.