Week 50 - Canadian

Back from vacation, back to the 52 week cooking challenge! The theme for Week 50 of the challenge was Canadian. We did an entire unit of Canadian WorldEats (before we changed up our way of doing WorldEats), but I still wasn't sure what to make. After some searching and talking with A, maple-glazed salmon seemed like the perfect choice. Maple syrup is pretty much always associated with Canada, and there's tons of salmon up there. Even better, I found a recipe on a Canadian website and the best available salmon at Trader Joe's the day we went was - yup, you guessed it - from Canada. If maple-glazed Canadian salmon with a recipe from Canadian Living wasn't Canadian enough for this challenge, not sure what would be (other than poutine).

I decided to pair up the salmon with some greens and other vegetables we brought back from our recent Costco run. That seemed like a nice healthy and simple way to ease back into our cooking routine.

The salmon required very few ingredients, just the salmon ($8.44), 1/8 cup of maple syrup ($1.12), 2 tsp of whole grain mustard ($0.05), and 2 tsp of soy sauce ($0.10). The salmon portion of dinner was approximately $9.71 and the vegetable side was no more than a couple of dollars. I would have added some lentils or grains to the meal, but we had earlier indulged in some Shack burgers as a snack (easing out of vacation eating mode ... slowly), so we didn't need any more filling calories.

The salmon was super simple to make. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Add the salmon to a foil-lined baking sheet. Spoon glaze over the fish. Bake for about 12 minutes until flaky and done. I'm not sure if 12 minutes was the right amount of time for our oven and we don't make enough fish to really know what the right time would be, so I guess we'll keep experimenting. The edges were a little overdone and the middle was definitely not, but overall, it was fine and not too overcooked at that amount of time. It didn't come out looking very pink on the outside, but it was on the inside.

The glaze was pretty good. It was a little sweet from the syrup and a little salty from the mustard and the soy sauce, but other than sweet and salty notes, we didn't really taste each individual ingredient very much. I thought it was going to be very sweet like maple syrup, but it was pretty balanced and tasty.

This was a good way to get back to the challenge (and no, I didn't just skip Week 49 - I need to pick up some ingredients for it that I can't get to for a few days). We liked our salmon and power greens dinner.