Start your year out right with Greek Salmon

Did you decide to make a New Year resolution?  Is it along the lines of lose weight, eat better, or try new foods?  Well you're in luck if it was because I have an easy weeknight meal but nice enough for a cook at home date night meal.  Plus, it tastes like a gyro without the bread!  I wrote last week that one of my resolutions was to start phasing out foods that might be causing my stomach some havoc so that is why I went for no bread, but doesn't it look so pretty?

Alright so the recipe is fairly simple.  We first start out making the sauce and cutting the cucumber and peeling the skin off of it.  You can keep it on if you don't mind it, or even buy an English cucumber, but I went for the cost effective one and put a little more prep time into it.  

Again it's your recipe, and I don't need the cucumber to be peeled perfectly so now we slice it down the middle, lengthwise.

Take a spoon and remove the seeds. The seeds give off a lot of moisture and I don't want that in my sauce so I remove them. 

Now we only need about 1/2 of the cucumber so I just cut it into long thin strips and then crosswise to give it a small dice.  You want to have the crunch throughout each bit of the sauce. 

Now throw in the Greek yogurt to a small mixing bowl.

Add in the cucumber, dill weed, minced garlic, celery salt, and black pepper to the yogurt and stir until all combined.  Set aside.

Now I have to admit that I started with one idea for the recipe and presentation for the salmon but then midway cooking and picture taking, I went another direction.  For that I will give you a little cooking tip:  When cooking salmon you can remove the skin before cooking of remove after cooking.  Once the skin is cooked the skin is very easy to remove.  

I had originally planned to do a salmon gyro so I was going to flake the salmon when cooking so I removed the skin before.  As soon as I took the skin off I had another idea and nixed the bread portion of the recipe.  

So here is a helpful picture if you want to remove the skin before cooking.  You make a little slit between the fish and the skin so that you can get your knife in there.  As you are carefully running your knife along the edge in the skin, pointing the knife away from you, pull the salmon skin that has been separated from the meat towards you to create tension and to help you knife guide along the skin.  

This is what the skin of the salmon will look like.  No meat on it.  Now throw the skin away.

In a hot skillet add in the salmon, skin side down or "use to be" skin side down, and cook for about 4 minutes.

Get your spatula, and carefully flip over the salmon.

Look at that pretty crust!  Now cook for another 3 to 5 minutes depending on the size of your salmon steaks. 

The salmon will be done when it is opaque and is flaky.  As you can see it flakes very easily.  

Now put the salmon on the plate, top with the yogurt sauce, kalamata olives, tomatoes, and feta cheese. 

Greek Salmon

Serves 4

1/2 c. Cucumber, peeled, diced small

1 c. Greek yogurt, plain, non-fat

1 Tbsp. dill weed

1 clove garlic, minced

1 tsp. celery salt

1/4 tsp. black pepper

1 Tbsp. olive oil

1 lb. salmon

1/2 c. Kalamata olives, pitted, halved

1/2 c. grape tomatoes, halved

1/2 c. Feta cheese, crumbled

 To prepare the sauce, in a medium bowl add the Greek yogurt, cucumber, dill weed, garlic, celery salt and pepper and stir until all combined. Set aside. In a medium skillet over medium high heat, add in the olive oil and salmon and cook skin side up for about 4 minutes.  Turn the fish over with a spatula, and cook another 3 to 5 minutes until the salmon is opaque and flaky.  Transfer salmon to plate and top with cucumber yogurt sauce, olives, tomatoes, and feta cheese. 

-Cool