Saturday night supper: Green salad, grilled salmon & courgettes

Saturday wasn’t ideal: we came home at lunchtime from our stay at The Halkin to a very bruised & battered Violet the whippet, and poor Rog, our long-suffering neighbour who had taken her to the vet, quite obviously needed some restorative feeding. I immediately made doorstop chicken, mayo, lettuce & plum tomato sandwiches on squishy white bread & insisted he return for supper.

After my gastronomic odyssey around California and the stunning six course tasting menu at David Thompson’s Nahm on Friday night, all I wanted was a salad. But you can’t feed hungry men just salad. So we poked around in the fridge, and put together a green salad, seared salmon with soy, Jersey Royals and griddled courgette (zucchini) with olive oil, sea salt & mint. Which took a scant 25 minutes to prepare & cook.

The salad was Webb’s (butter) lettuce with chunks of smooth ripe avocado with two handfuls of rapidly defrosted petit pois thrown over it. As this is a soft salad, & we were cooking yielding salmon & potatoes, I added some textural crunch to the salad with peeled cucumber dice, shards of chicory & chopped Little Gem.

I like soft lettuce & pea salads with creamy dressings rather than vinaigrette, in a bastardised homage to petit pois a la Francaise, so I made a quick dressing from fresh mayonnaise from a tub I found in the fridge, thinned with milk and whisked together with salt & pepper.

The Jersey Royals were simply boiled, and served with a slick of salted butter; we seared the salmon on a hot plate with soy sauce.

I brushed thick slices of courgette with olive oil

and griddled them on a very, very hot pan for just a few minutes so they still had some resistance. I finished them off with chopped fresh apple mint from the garden, Greek olive oil, crunchy Maldon salt & black pepper.

I don’t eat salmon, so I had some fresh mozzarella instead from this bag of heaven:

We had a very enthusiastic audience as we ate: