Seafood Resolution Resolved: Salmon Caesar Salad

I haven't made nearly enough salads this Summer. With produce at its peak I decided to make more of an effort to make salads a part of lunch and/or dinner around here this past week. Since I had some salmon in the freezer and another resolution (cook with seafood!) to knock off my New Year's Food Resolution list I decided to tackle Salmon Caesar Salad.

This recipe is based on one that I found here on a blog called Clean & Delicious. I didn't change too much - just a couple of things based on our taste preferences. For example, this recipe calls for tomato and asparagus in the salad. I had tomato on hand but no asparagus. Both would likely be quite nice, making for a bit more modern Caesar, but I didn't include either. The dressing I made exactly as directed and it was very good. We had enough to make salad for lunch the next day, with more leftover. 

I started preparing this dish by making the dressing a few hours in advance. I wanted to give the flavours time to meld. The taste of the dressing is fantastic - very tangy. It was even more flavourful the next day.
 
Caesar Salad Dressing - from Clean & Delicious

1 big or 2 small cloves of garlic, minced
1 tsp anchovy paste
2 tsp Dijon mustard
2 tbsp of lemon juice
½ tsp Worcestershire sauce
½ cup of non fat Greek yogurt


Combine garlic through Worcestershire sauce in a small bowl, stirring to combine. Stir in yogurt. Makes 3/4 cup of dressing.

Next I made some croutons, since any Caesar salad worth eating needs croutons. To make the croutons I sliced 2 large slices of sourdough bread into cubes and scattered these on a baking pan. I put the pan in a 250 degree oven for 10 minutes to dry/toast the bread. Then I heated a tablespoon of olive oil and a tablespoon of butter in a skillet and added the toasted bread, stirring the cubes around to coat in the oil/butter mixture. I sprinkled the works with some basil. I likely cooked them for about 5 minutes. Then I put them on a paper towel to soak up any excess oil/butter.

Close to dinner I had David grill some salmon fillets on the BBQ. While he was doing that I tossed the dressing and croutons with some romaine lettuce and sprinkled on fresh grated Parmesan cheese. Seriously one of the easiest dinners you will ever make. Everything about this meal is fresh, fresh, fresh. We loved it.

Another bonus of making his meal is that I got to use my beautiful wooden salad bowl, which was a wedding gift (many, many years ago). (I didn't get a great picture of it but trust me, it's lovely.) For the first few years I had this bowl I only got it out for special occasions. Now that I've used it twice in the past two weeks I want to make more of an effort to use it regularly. One, it will require me to make salad more often and two, why can't every dinner be a special occassion? That was the whole reason I started the Sunday dinner tradition of having us eat in the dining room - to make sure a beautiful room was used and loved more often than at Easter or Christmas. And it's working, since the boys now look forward to our Sunday dinners almost as much as I do.