One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Nom

cvillette has given me hospitality salmon recipes, and as is well and fitting and increases reputation, I return to shower gifts salmon recipes in kind.

(Can you tell I've read the entirety of The Odyssey in the last 36 hours?)

This is out of Cook Something, which I bought for five bucks at a used bookstore lo these seven years ago and has served me well, with some modifications made by yours truly. It's a good basic cookbook, actually, if anyone wants one: lots of fast and good stuff.

We Need
Four 6-ounce salmon filets
Salt (kosher salt!) and freshly ground black pepper
Flour
2 tbsp vegetable oil
3 tbsp unsalted butter
1/2 cup dry white wine
2 tbsp Dijon mustard
1/2 chicken stock
Juice of 1/2 lemon. And not that Realemon shit. A real (space) lemon.
1/3 cup heavy cream
Fresh sage, chives, and marjoram, to taste
Spinach. Just eyeball it.

Okay. So first put on your rice, because that'll take longer than the rest of this. And if you have to wait for the rice cooker to go off while this sauce is smelling up your kitchen, you will be sad. Trust me. And don't forget to put the steamer basket on top of that rice cooker. We'll need it.

Take your nice salmon and season with salt and pepper, and then dredge it lightly in flour until it's coated just a bit (you can still see the bright orange through the flour, not like, caking it on). Heat the vegetable oil in a pan (recipe says skillet, meh, use a pan) over medium-high heat and saute the salmon for about 4 minutes. It should be that pale-golden colour now. Take it out and set it aside. Get rid of the excess oil.

At this point, you want to pop that spinach in the steamer basket and wilt it.

Melt the butter in the pan, then pour in the wine, and heat that over the same heat until it simmers. Then add the mustard, stock, and the lemon juice, which I hope you didn't take from a bottle. Get the herbs in here at this point too, torn or fine-chopped as suits your aesthetic sensibilities -- won't matter to the flavour. Cook this for about five minutes, and then stir in the cream.

Once that simmers, put the salmon back in and cook it until it's thick enough to coat your spoon.

The rice better be done by now. Because it is nom time. Rice on the side, spinaches as a bed under the fish, sauce all over everything. The sauce recipe can be doubled, too, if you're a big glutton like me with a penchant for cream sauces. This will save you creeping back into the kitchen to make the extra sauce batch the next day.

All in all, this takes about 15-20 minutes. Enjoy!