graffed

Healthy Recipes – Baked herbed salmon with tomato and rice stuffed round courgette

by admin on July 28th, 2009

Hello

Hi, this is Daniel here, the developer behind graffed. I’ve stayed silent on the blog so far but thought it was about time I introduced myself and one of my passions: cooking. I want to make it clear that although I am passionate about cooking, I am also entirely an amateur and there may be some mistakes along the way in my posts, so go easy on me.

Healthy Eating

So in terms of graffed, I thought I could start including some healthy recipes to help you trim your body and reach your targets. It also gives me an excuse to start a recipe blog! I am a strong believer in eating for pleasure rather than sustenance, what else do we have an excuse to do 3 times a day to indulge ourselves (with our clothes on at least). Being healthy does not have to mean being boring. I am also wary of obsessive counting, being sensible most of the time is more important to me than convincing myself into shameful guilt for having a chocolate bar at lunchtime. This means I won’t be putting calorie counts and such on the recipes. I’ll try and estimate the healthiness and give indications of where you can cut back a recipe or maybe even be more indulgent though.

Margaret’s big round courgettes

Stunning round courgettes from Magz

Part of the credit for this blog must also go to Magz, who very kindly and unexpectedly donated two amazing round courgettes from her allotment.

The recipe

(serves two)

• 1 large round courgette (or 2 normal medium courgettes)
• 2 thick salmon fillets
• 1/2 medium red onion
• 10 cherry tomatoes, or 2 medium tomatoes
• Chilli flakes or hot pepper sauce
• 1 cup of rice
• Sea salt and freshly ground pepper
• Dried basil
• Fresh basil
• Parmesan (optional)

Turn your oven onto 200 degrees c fan assisted (220 unassisted).

Initially we’re going to make the stuffing for the courgettes. I’m not too fussy about tomato skins and seeds, but if you are, skin and deseed them after blanching in hot water for 1 minute. Roughly chop the tomatoes and onion. Boil these together with the rice for the specified time on the packet. Drain and reserve on the side.

Now we’re going to prepare the courgettes. Chop them in half and scoop out the insides to leave approximately a 1cm thick shell. You can discard the insides. We’re going to add some seasoning to the stuffing, personally I used fresh basil, salt, pepper, hot pepper sauce and a touch of tomato puree all blended in, but go with your instinct. Once that’s mixed in with the rice, fill the courgettes with the delicious mixture.

Salmon being prepped in the foil

The salmon is extremely easy to prepare. Just rub the oil, salt, pepper and dried basil all over it and place it in a sheet of tinfoil. Fold the tinfoil up into a tent which is as tightly sealed as possible, but with some room above the salmon.

So, chuck the courgettes on a baking sheet and place them in the oven. In total we’re going to cook them for about 45 minutes. Hence 15 or 20 minutes (depending on thickness of the fillets) before the end of cooking, place the salmon in the oven. Extract from the oven and serve simply by themselves, wonderful:

Indulgence: I added a topping of grated Parmesan about halfway through cooking the courgettes for a nice crisp cheesy topping.

The good and the bad

From my perspective, there’s lots of good in this recipe. We have a nice oily fish, salmon, cooked simply and healthily by being baked in the oven. There are also chilli elements and onion, together with both red and green vegetables and a nice balance between fish, vegetable and carbohydrate. You could replace the white rice with brown to be extra good, just cook the rice longer as per the instructions. Otherwise a good recipe to start with!

The finished article

Tags: courgette, healthy recipe, recipe, salmon

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 at 9:51 pm and is filed under Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.