Healthy Meal: Well-Dressed Salmon

After an amazing time at the wedding this weekend – but way too much delicious wedding food and drink – it’s now time for some detox. When most people “detox,” they mean some stupid restrictive diet that ends up with them probably less healthy when they started. My version of detox is far healthier and far more delicious: I just avoid junk food, limit starchy carbs, and load up on the fruits, veggies, and lean proteins. Tonight’s dinner is the perfect example of that, and best of all, it’s probably one of the quickest dinners I’ve ever made: Rachael Ray’s Well-Dressed Salmon.

I normally stock on my proteins when they’re cheap and then freeze them, and this salmon was no exception. Grabbing it out of the freezer, I popped it into the microwave on defrost for a few minutes, turning the George Foreman grill on to preheat simultaneously. While those hummed away, I started peeling 1/2 of a cucumber and dicing that along with as a tomato and 1/4 red onion.

The microwave beeped about halfway through my chopping, and I quickly transferred the thawed fish to the grill, tossing on some low-sodium grill seasoning before putting the top down to cook both sides simultaneously. This is why I love my Foreman: not only can you cook without added fats/oils, but your food cooks twice as fast as on the stove because it’s getting heated from both sides.

While the fish cooked, I finished my chopping, and scattered all the veggies on a big plate. In a little mini Tupperware I keep around specifically for sauces and dressings, I combined dill, mustard, a pinch of sugar, and some apple cider vinegar. The recipe called for a lot of olive oil, but I find that when working with mustard, it thickens up dressings enough that you don’t need the olive oil to bind everything together. After a quick shake, the dressing was ready to go.

The instructions call for putting the salmon down and topping it with the relish, but I had made a ton of relish (really, more like a salad), so I opted to use that as the base and put the salmon on top. I drizzled the dressing over, and it really looked great! I’m also happy to report that it tasted as good as it looked – my sole complaint was that the heat from the fish warmed some of the veggies, and I would have preferred them to be icy cold in contrast to the hot fish… but that’s just a simple matter of plating differently.

Nutrition stats:
Review: 5/5 stars
This is my new favorite recipe for something quick, healthy, and filling. I sometimes can’t eat raw onions without my mouth getting too acidic, but the sweetness of the dressing tempered that so it didn’t affect me at all. I still can’t believe I was able to make this so quickly (about 12 minutes!), and I’m going to be making this all the time from now on.