Teriyaki Salmon

Just looking at my recent posts, it seems like all we cook is fish. That is really not the case. It is just that the most interesting dishes I make usually involve fish. In between these dinners are days when we have roasted chicken breasts or pork chops or pasta in one form or another. Sometimes I can come up with a neat recipe for chicken, but I'm not going to post about plain old chicken. And since I'm feeding children, usually that's how we have it - plain. My kids recoil at the sight of pepper on their chicken. Really we do eat a lot of fish and much less red meat than we used too.

So here goes another salmon dish. The saving grace here is that this glaze can be used on chicken breasts or pork chops. I really like it on roasted chicken wings. It is also fine on shrimp. But my favorite, of course, is with salmon. I love sticky salmon. In a recent post, I discussed a salmon glaze that wasn't so hot. I said I've had better sticky glazes and this is one of them. It is the Ginger Teriyaki Marinade from Nina Simonds' Spices of Life. I love Nina Simonds' books because she is all about asian flavors with a healthful leaning. My favorite of her books is A Spoonful of Ginger. She also has an interesting blog that I need to add to my blog roll. I like that she makes healthy meals but she doesn't sacrifice taste to that end. For example, the following recipe has 7 Tablespoons of sugar in the glaze. That's a lot. But the glaze is for nearly 2 lbs of meat or seafood. I probably only used a tablespoon full of glaze on each portion of salmon, so it probably isn't that horrible for us to have. Dr. Atkins might not approve but I'm not too concerned with what Dr. Atkins thinks.

Her books are loaded with good recipes that are practical for real life, not too fussy or difficult. You do need to have a pantry stocked with asian ingredients though.

Ginger Teriyaki Marinade

1/3 c soy sauce
1/3 c water
1/3 c sake
7 T sugar
1 1/2 T minced fresh ginger
1 t dried chile flakes
1 1/2 T corn starch

Mix together all the ingredients in a heavy med. saucepan and heat until thickened, stirring constantly oved med. heat with a wooden spoon to prevent lumps. Remove from heat and cool slightly.

Note: you can halve this recipe but you need a really small saucepan. You can save any extra marinade for another day just don't taint it by allowing any utensils that touched the fish or chicken come in contact with the marinade.

Also, don't walk away from this while it is heating. It comes to a boil and thickens very fast.

For the salmon, I don't use it as a marinade but as a glaze. I sear the salmon, flip it, brush it with the glaze and stick it in a hot oven 400' until the salmon is done to my liking. It is good to give it an additional brushing of glaze when it is about halfway cooked.