September 30, 2012 A Family Dinner- Grilled Salmon with kale and quinoa Salad and Squash Pancakes

September 30, 2012 A Family Dinner- Grilled Salmon with kale and quinoa Salad and Squash Pancakes

In the morning we picked a large green, oblong winter squash in our garden that must have weighed ten to fifteen pounds.

Then we went to Costco around 1:15 p.m. and picked up a 2 lb. salmon filet and asparagus and a few other items like a bottle of Rioja reserve tempranillo for $9.99.  As we were leaving Costco, Luke called around 2:15 p.m., to say his plane had arrived in Albuquerque, so we drove home and I went to pick him up at the airport..

On the way home we stopped at La Montanita Coop and Luke bought a few food items, including some quinoa.

  

Around dinner time we started processing the squash, by cutting it into wedges and peeling the green skin off it with a knife to reveal a lovely pale yellow/pink fairly soft flesh.  In about 1 hour I peeled and sectioned and Suzette processed squash into slices, shredded and I diced some squash into pieces that we then placed in freezer bags and froze, except for about 3 1/2 cups of shredded squash.  We found a simple recipe for potato pancakes in a Jewish Home Cooking Book

4 cups of shredded potatoes

½ cup flour

1 egg

1/2 tsp. of salt

1 cup of oil to fry the pancakes.

Suzette substituted 3 ½ cups of shredded squash and ½ cup of shredded onion and used canola oil to fry the pancakes in a large iron skillet.

Luke picked kale and I removed the center stalk from each kale leaf with a knife to leave two halved leaves.

Luke then boiled some quinoa and tossed it with the kale and some apple cider vinegar and oil to make a wilted kale and quinoa salad.

Before dinner Suzette cut a length of 1 X 6 inch cedar plank and soaked it in water for about fifteen minutes and then trimmed the salmon filet to fit inside the edge of the board and salt and peppered the filet and brushed it with olive oil and soaked it with lemon juice and put it on a hot grill to roast.

My Jewish tradition is to top potato pancakes with sour cream and sometimes chives, so I made a simple sauce by picking three long stalks of oregano in the garden and picking about ten stalks of chives and removing the leaves from the oregano stalks and chopping the leaves of oregano and then mincing the chives and mixing them into about ½ cup of sour cream (Crema con sal from Pro’s Ranch Market).

We set the table on the back patio and started by serving the wilted kale and quinoa salad and then when the salmon was cooked through to pink and the squash pancakes fried to golden brown, we plated ¼ of the salmon and one squash pancake onto each plate and dabbed spoonfuls of sour cream sauce onto the fish and pancakes.  

We served a bottle of chilled Concannon Sauvignon Blanc and then some Ferme Julien Rosé and enjoyed our garden fresh dinner under the almost full moon with both Luke and Willy together for the first time in over a year.

Bon Appétit