Kitchen RO

Roast salmon with lemon, green beans and butter

The one expensive dish of the week, and it earns its place. Twelve minutes in the oven, ten minutes of hands-on work.

30 min total 10 min hands-on 10.27 in totalovenfishomega-3quick
Portions
Quantities and the shopping list are recalculated
2

One portion

1,204
kcal
32
protein g
112
fat g
15
carbs g
Sodium491 mg / 667
Potassium1,295 mg / 1,567
Phosphorus473 mg / 400
Fibre8 g / 7

Against one meal out of three, at your daily targets. For fibre a full bar is the good thing; for the rest it's the opposite.

Ingredients

Fish
  • 240 g Salmon
Vegetables
  • 300 g Green beans
  • 300 g Courgette
  • 2 pcs Lemons
  • 3 pcs Garlic
  • 5 g Parsley
Fat and seasoning
  • 165 g Butter
  • 45 ml Olive oil
  • 20 g Walnuts · phosphorus
  • 2 g Salt · sodium
  • 1 g Black pepper

How it's made

7 steps

Big screen, one step at a time, with timers. The screen stays awake.

  1. Oven on at 200°C. Cut the courgette into rounds a centimetre thick and put it in the tray with half the olive oil.
    4 min
  2. Melt 60 g of butter in a bowl. Add the crushed garlic, the zest and juice of one lemon, and the pepper.
    4 min
  3. Sit the salmon on baking paper over the courgette, skin down. Pour the lemon butter over it. Don't salt it.
    Salt now pulls the water out of the fish and dries it. It goes on at the end, over the top.
  4. Into the oven for 12 minutes. At minute 6, scatter the frozen green beans around the fish, straight from the bag.
    12 min 200°C
    Salmon is done when a fork goes in without resistance and the flesh separates into flakes. If you're unsure, take it out — it carries on cooking for another 2 minutes on the counter.
  5. While it roasts, toast the walnuts in a dry pan on medium heat for 3 minutes, shaking the pan. When you can smell them they're ready. Chop them roughly.
    3 min
    Raw walnuts are just fatty. Three minutes in a dry pan turns them into an ingredient: you hear them, and they smell of walnut rather than cupboard.
  6. Take the tray out. Dot the rest of the butter over the vegetables, scatter the salt, squeeze the second lemon, pour over the remaining olive oil.
    2 min
  7. Scatter the walnuts and parsley. Rest 3 minutes before boxing up.
    3 min

Once a week, and only once. Salmon is the most expensive protein on the list — but its omega-3 fats are the one thing none of the other recipes can provide.

The only meal of the week with less meat, and that’s deliberate. A hundred and twenty grams of salmon per portion is less than you get with the pork or the chicken, because salmon costs three times as much per kilo and has the densest protein on the list. The missing calories come from butter and olive oil, not from fish. That keeps it at five euro a portion instead of nine.

The walnuts are there for contrast, not calories. Twenty grams, toasted, give the crunch that a plate of fish and soft vegetables otherwise lacks. More would be pointless: walnuts carry the most phosphorus in the whole plan, and this meal is already fish.

The alternative at an eighth of the price: two tins of mackerel in oil have the same omega-3. If money is tight this week, the mackerel does the same job.

Photo: DSCN3796 salmon fillet by Audrey Kirchner, licence BY-SA 2.0.