30-minute meal: spicy seafood salad with crispy salmon skin - MW

This warm, hearty salad is a mix of sweetness, acidity and warmth - and can be made with tofu as an alternative to vegetarian.

To see my twenty and thirty years going to Southeast Asia; I love the food, the experience, the relaxed lifestyle. When I create homemade salads, ingredients that remind me of holidays in Thailand or Vietnam often make their way, alongside a jumble of other techniques.

For this dish, a simple spicy salad is used to color the pan on which the seafood is cooked. This creates a layer of glaze, caramel, to coat the seafood, a good contrast to the cool heat of vegetable salads.

Spicy seafood salad with crispy salmon skin
Here I used salmon and tiger prawns, but squid, squid or other solid fish would work just fine.

I also ate this type of salad with hard tofu or boiled eggs instead of seafood - play and mix it around to make it work for your family.

Prep: 20 mins
Cook: 10 mins
Serves: 4, plus intentional leftovers

To make the glaze and dressing
This is meant to be hot! Reduce the number of chillies, dilute with a little water or add some coconut cream blobs to your salad to take out some of the bite, if you need to.

2 large garlic cloves
3-4 small bird’s eye chillies
3 coriander roots, attached to ~2 cm of stalk, well washed to remove sand
2 limes, juiced, include the pith in the sauce
~150ml fish sauce
40g panela or raw sugar or palm sugar

Place garlic, chillies and coriander roots in a mortar and pestle or blender and work it until you have a thick paste. Add the lime juice and about equal portions of fish sauce to the mix. Add half the sugar and continue to taste and add more until sweetness is evident on your palate. You need to be able to taste chilli heat, sugar, sour and salt to get the balance right.

To make the salad
1 large bunch broccolini, cut into thirds
1 sweetcorn
2 lebanese cucumbers
½ punnet cherry tomatoes
1 medium carrot
1 shallot
1 avocado
Handful of coriander, stalks and all, torn
Handful of parsley, stalks and all, torn
Handful of Vietnamese mint or common mint, stalks and all, torn
Coconut flakes, lightly toasted
2 fillets salmon, ~600g
12 green prawns, peeled ~500g
Coconut oil

Steam the broccolini and corn for two minutes to thin, but keep crisp, then let cool. Remove the corn from the cob, carefully cutting the seeds. Cut the cucumbers into quarters, then into 5 cm long pieces. Cut the cherry tomatoes in half. Carrots and chives, chopped or mandolin. Cut the avocado, remove the seeds and cut into 3 cm cubes.

Tear all the vegetables and herbs, except the butter. Add a third to half the ice, according to your desire for heat, mix gently then add the pieces of butter.

Serve the salad on a common plate or put the ingredients on a separate plate and then start cooking the seafood.

Heat a large skillet with coconut oil on top. Add the salmon fillet, face down and cook 8 to 10 minutes until the skin is dark and you can see the color of the fish changing the side of the fillets.

While the salmon cooks, slice the tail along the back, remove the poop tube as needed, but leave the tail.

Turn the salmon fillet over and carefully peel off the crisp skin, then leave it on a few paper towels to make a crunchy piece.

Carefully add the shrimp to the pan, placing them so that the butter touches the pan. Carefully add the other half of the ice and let it froth and reduce, until you have a thick layer of sticky sauce covering the cooked shrimp - this will take a minute or two.

Take the shrimp on a plate and turn off the heat under the pan. Let the salmon sit in the pan for two minutes before delicately breaking it into 3 to 5 cm pieces. Mix the salmon in a sticky sauce, add the shrimp and add a drop of coconut oil to make it liquid and shiny beautifully.

Distribute the seafood on the salad, along with any additional yeast. Finally, sprinkle on the salad pieces of toasted coconut and pieces of crispy salmon skin.

At week-end

• The remaining salad and seafood cried out to be turned into rice paper for the next lunch.
• Additional pieces of salmon can be cooked with the same method (with or without sauce) and used inside the omelet for a hearty dinner the next day. Use it with lots of dressing after cooking to get an extra kick.
• If the sauce is too spicy for you to use it only for this meal, it will keep in the refrigerator for a week or more, diluted with coconut cream and added to the pumpkin soup, used as a dip for the vegetables. tubers or mix through crushed avo for quick guacamole dip.

MW