Honey-Wasabi Glazed Salmon or Honey-Mustard Glazed Salmon

My latest book, BAREFOOT SEASON, was released this week. BAREFOOT SEASON is set on Blackberry Island, Washington. As on all islands I’ve ever visited, seafood is a staple on Blackberry Island. I live in Seattle, so seafood is pretty big in my world, too.

One of the things I love about seafood is how fast it cooks. This honey-wasabi glazed salmon is a terrific weeknight meal for busy people. If you can’t find prepared wasabi sauce, or it’s too spicy for you, you can substitute your favorite mustard. From start to finish, it takes about half an hour to get dinner on the table. Tastes great with a light, summery white wine.

Be sure to visit www.blackberryisland.com to read Chapter 1 of BAREFOOT SEASON and to get some fabulous blackberry recipes! If you love salmon as much as I do, try the Blackberry Chipotle Sauce as a glaze for salmon. I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m thinking it will be incredible. It’s next on my list!

Recipe: Honey-Wasabi Glazed Salmon or Honey-Mustard Glazed Salmon

½ C honey
2 T prepared Wasabi sauce or spicy mustard
2T soy sauce
1 clove garlic, minced
½ t fresh ginger, minced
4 salmon fillets, ½ pound each

Preheat the oven to 375. Line a rimmed baking sheet with aluminum foil and spray with nonstick cooking spray. Warm the honey in the microwave for 10 second increments until it’s runny enough to stir in the other ingredients.

Place the salmon skin-side down on the aluminum foil. Spoon the glaze over the salmon pieces. Bake about 20 minutes, until fish flakes easily with a fork, brushing with glaze every five minutes.

Citrus Shrimp with Pasta

A printable version of this recipe and lots more are at www.susanmallery.com/recipes.php!

My next book, BAREFOOT SEASON, will be out on March 27. Barefoot Season is the first book of my Blackberry Island series. On every island, seafood is a staple because it’s so readily available. Even on the mainland, shrimp is a great weeknight dinner. First of all, it’s delicious. And second, it goes from raw to cooked in five minutes. (From raw to over-cooked in six… oops!) This recipe takes about twice that long because of prep time… a little longer than that, when you factor in the time it takes to boil the water for the pasta. From start to finish, less than 20 minutes, and it’s impressive enough for company.

Next time, I’m going to make the sauce as a marinade for the shrimp, then cook the shrimp on skewers. I’m going to serve it as an appetizer, without all the carbs from the pasta. I bet it would be delicious cold in a salad, too. Maybe spinach with actual chunks of citrus. See, the shrimp was so delicious that I’m already thinking about making it again!

Recipe: Citrus Shrimp with Pasta

1 lb. shrimp, peeled and de-veined.

½ C olive oil
¼ C parmesan cheese
¼ C pine nuts + 2 T, divided
½ C fresh parsley, loosely packed
Juice of one orange
Juice of one lemon
Zest of half the orange
Zest of the lemon
1 dried red pepper, or ½ t red pepper flakes
½ t salt
¼ t black pepper
1 lb dried pasta (I used spaghetti)

Leave the shrimp in the refrigerator until just before you put it in the pan.

Cook the pasta according to package directions. While it’s cooking, combine the olive oil, cheese, ¼ C of pine nuts, and the parsley through pepper in a food processor. Pulse several times, until combined. Heat a large, deep sauté pan over medium heat. Add the citrus sauce. Once it’s simmering, add the shrimp and simmer until it’s no longer translucent, about five minutes.

Drain the noodles. Toss with shrimp, sauce, and remaining pine nuts.

Garlic Butter Salmon with Teriyaki-Glazed Green Beans

You’ll find more free recipes – and excerpts of my books – at SusanMallery.com!

The hero of my latest book, ONLY MINE, Finn Andersson is a sexy, rugged small airplane pilot from Alaska. When ONLY MINE hit #10 on the New York Times bestsellers list, my friend Marilyn of Marilyn’s Romance Reviews suggested I should celebrate with an Alaskan salmon dinner. What a perfect idea!

Marilyn sent me a recipe for barbecue sauce for salmon, but I wasn’t in the mood for a tomato-based sauce. She also sent me a link to this recipe for Taku Glacier Lodge Salmon Baste. That recipe looked delicious, but I didn’t have any brown sugar on hand. Plus, it was a recipe for 8 salmon fillets, which means I would have to do math to cut the recipe down for me and my husband.

I decided to use the two recipes from Marilyn as inspiration for my own salmon basting sauce. This Garlic Butter Salmon is, if I do say so myself, incredibly delicious! I paired it with Teriyaki-Glazed Green Beans. All in all, a terrific way to celebrate the #10 spot on the New York Times list. Life is good!

Recipe: Garlic Butter Salmon

2 salmon fillets, 1 pound total
¼ C butter
4 cloves garlic
1 t soy sauce
1 t granulated sugar

Cut the butter into chunks and put in a small microwave-safe bowl with the garlic, soy sauce, and sugar. Microwave at 50% power for 30 seconds. Stir well until all the butter is melted.

Preheat the grill. (I use an indoor grill.) Create an aluminum foil boat for each salmon fillet. Brush the bottom of the foil with the butter mixture. Place the salmon on the foil boats and baste with butter. Grill for about ten minutes, basting every two minutes, until salmon flakes easily with a fork.

Recipe: Teriyaki-Glazed Green Beans

1 lb fresh green beans
1 T sesame seeds
1 T sesame oil
1/3 C teriyaki sauce

Place the greens in a large sauté pan with about half a cup of water. Cover. Cook over medium heat until the water is mostly gone, about 5 minutes. While the green beans are cooking, toast the sesame seeds in a small, dry sauté pan. Be careful, the seeds will burn easily.

Uncover the beans. Add the sesame oil to the pan and toss to coat. Cook another 2 minutes. Add the teriyaki sauce and toss to coat. Put on a plate and then sprinkle the beans with the sesame seeds.

Gravlax (Salt and Sugar Cured Salmon)

Find more free recipes - and excerpts of my books, including the latest Fool's Gold romance, ONLY MINE, at www.susanmallery.com!

I'd like to welcome Louisa Edwards to my kitchen! Louisa writes a series of steamy, sexy romances with a cooking twist.

Louisa Edwards:

My next book, Too Hot to Touch, is out on August 2nd! It’s the first installment in my new contemporary romance trilogy, and it introduces a team of talented young chefs competing in a high-stakes culinary competition for fame, fortune…and each other’s hearts.

As you might have guessed, there’s plenty of food in my books! I think you can say a lot with what you choose to cook—and my hero, Max Lunden, definitely understands the language of food. The language of love? That, he needs a little help with. Luckily, he’s got Jules Cavanaugh, their tough-talking team leader…who just happens to have had a crush on Max since they were teenagers. Now that they have to work together, though, she’s determined to keep her cool—no matter how hot it gets!

The competition is fierce, and the whole team has to pull together to create a winning menu. I wanted to share one of the three recipes that appears in the back of Too Hot to Touch. This one is for gravlax, one of my favorite things to make. It’s a super adaptable recipe, perfect when you’ve got houseguests or a dinner party, because it’s one of those where you throw the ingredients together and then just stick it in the fridge and forget about it.

I know it sounds fancy, but gravlax is just salt and sugar-cured salmon—sort of like smoked salmon without the smoke! The salt/sugar blend “cooks” the fish, and leaves it with a firm, supple texture and a delicious, lightly sweet and herbal flavor that you can change, depending on what you add while it’s curing. I’ve made it with dill and gin instead of tarragon and Pernod, with no alcohol at all (it’s completely optional), and it always tastes delicious and refreshing. Perfect for such a hot summer!

I hope you enjoy the Too Hot to Touch team’s version…and if you want to find out whether the recipe helps them win a spot in the Rising Star Chef competition, and if Max and Jules figure out how to tell each other what they really feel, read the book!

Too Hot to Touch on Amazon
Too Hot to Touch on Barnes & Noble

Recipe: Beck’s New York-Style Gravlax

2 lb whole salmon fillet, skin on (ask fishmonger to remove all pin bones)
2 cups granulated sugar
1 cup salt
4 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
1 tablespoon black pepper
4 bunches fresh tarragon
¼ cup Pernod, or other anise-flavored liqueur (optional)

Rinse the fish, checking for loose scales, and pat dry with paper towels.

Stir together the garlic, sugar, salt and pepper in a large bowl. Coat the bottom of a 9 x 13 casserole with about a third of the mixture.
Lay the fish, skin side down, across the sugar mixture in the pan. Place one bunch of tarragon around the sides of the salmon, then pour the rest of the sugar mixture over the top of the fish, making sure to cover it completely.

Spread the rest of the tarragon over the coated fish, then (if you want) pour the Pernod over all and cover with plastic wrap.

You may place a weighted 8 x 11 pan on top of the covered salmon to help the curing process and absorption of the tarragon oil into the sugar, but it’s not strictly necessary.

Put the pan in the refrigerator and allow to cure for two to three days. Check the salmon every twelve hours or so to make sure it’s still covered, adding more sugar and salt if needed.

When ready to serve, remove the gravlax from the pan and rinse well. Pat dry with paper towels and slice thinly across the grain. Great on sandwiches, in salads, with eggs—anywhere you’d use smoked salmon! It’s especially good on crackers with sour cream, diced red onion, and capers…

Dill Salmon

Seafood doesn’t get any fresher than it is here in the Pacific Northwest. One of the things I love best about fish is that it cooks so fast. That makes all kinds of seafood a great choice when you’re in a time crunch for dinner.

Salmon is one of my favorite kinds of fish. It tastes great with nothing more than a spritz of fresh lemon juice and a sprinkling of salt. I went a little farther than that with this recipe, but not much. From start to finish, you can have this quick & easy recipe for dill salmon on the table in 15 minutes.

And it’s delicious, too!

Serve this with a nice spinach salad with vinegar and oil. (It’s pictured here with the Thanksgiving appetizers that I made for last week’s blog because I made all those recipes in one wild Sunday of cooking.)

Recipe: Quick & Easy Dill Salmon

2 salmon fillets
1 T olive oil
1 t dried dill
½ t salt
½ t pepper
1 clove garlic, minced

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Make a paste with the oil and spices, then rub all over the salmon. Bake for about 15 minutes, depending on thickness, flipping once.

Shrimp Tacos

I love eating in restaurants. Truthfully, I love it much more than cooking. But sometimes, a restaurant just plain gets it wrong. I recently ordered Shrimp Tacos and was presented with cold cocktail shrimp on a cold flour tortilla with coleslaw on top. Coleslaw.

If this isn’t a travesty of justice, I don’t know what is. Isn’t coleslaw German? Now if they had called this Shrimp Schnitzel, I might’ve been able to accept the claim. I wouldn’t have ordered it, but at least I wouldn’t have fumed with righteous indignation.

Sadly, my lawyer said misrepresentation is hard to prove, so my only recourse was to make shrimp tacos the way they were meant to be made.

I found a terrific recipe from Rookie Cookie. Shrimp Tacos One of my goals with this blog is to help bring attention to some of the terrific cooking bloggers out there. I include a link rather than the recipe so that you’ll go to Rookie Cookie’s site to get the recipe. (And I don’t believe in taking credit for someone else’s work.)

No coleslaw in site. These are taco toppings, people! And the shrimp was cooked immediately before serving so it was warm. “Fresh shrimp” does not mean “fresh from the fridge.”

I cut down on the prep work by buying pre-peeled and –deveined shrimp. Makes life so much easier that it’s worth the higher price. I did make a couple small additions to her recipe. I added a dash of cayenne pepper to the marinade to give it a little kick, and I included shredded cheese with the toppings.

Marinated Swai (White Fish) and Grilled Avocados

I have a shameful secret, and I’m about to confess it publicly: I bought frozen fish.

It’s entirely possible this wouldn’t be shameful where you live, but I live in Seattle where frozen fish is sacrilege. But in my defense, I’m a word girl, so when I saw an unfamiliar word on a package of fish at the supermarket, I couldn’t resist.

Swai.

That was the word that caused me to turn my back on my Seattle brethren. Swai. I don’t even know how it’s pronounced. Sway, as in Sway to the music? Or Swhy, as in Swhy on earth did you buy frozen fish?!
But whatever, I bought it. I’ll get over the guilt.

One of my goals when I started this blog was to link to recipes I find online and, since I had no idea how to cook swai, this seemed like a good time to get started. So I searched for swai recipes and discovered the fish is also known as basa and panga. It’s from the catfish family, a firm white fish.

And it’s farm-raised in Viet Nam.

I’m nervous eating seafood in Illinois because the fish is flown in from the coast. And now I'm going to eat frozen fish flown all the way in from Viet Nam? What was I thinking?

I settled on this recipe for Basa Swai with Lemon Pepper. Which, interestingly, does not have lemon pepper on it. It has lemon and pepper, but no lemon pepper.

The first ingredient of the marinade is white wine or Italian dressing. Rule of thumb: Always choose the wine.

I marinated the fish for four hours. The fillets weren’t completely thawed when I put them into the marinade, but they were by the time I took them out.
While they were marinating, a Facebook fan told me that she found a recipe for Avocado Fries on the Taste of Home Facebook page. That recipe was on Kitchn.com. Although they looked delicious, I decided that recipe was more work than I wanted to do last night, but I noticed a recipe for Grilled Guacamole. I was intrigued.

In the end, even smooshing the avocados with a fork was more work than I wanted to do, so I grilled the avocados and sprinkled them with a little salt and pepper and left it at that. I was worried that flipping the avocados would be difficult because they’re so soft, but it wasn’t too bad. I did leave little bits of green on the grill.

My husband loved the grilled avocado. I liked it fine, but I like it better raw and didn’t think grilling was worth the effort. My dog felt that she would’ve liked either of them, and she felt it very strongly.

And voila! Marinated Swai and Grilled Avocado. Doesn’t it look pretty?

The marinade is light and tasty, and the fish tasted pretty good. I’ll make it again… but I’ll use it on fresh fish next time.