Week 4: Beef Empanadas Postponed

My friend Mike and I went to Whole Foods yesterday during rush hour, so it was nearly impossible to find anything.  We had all of our ingredients to make the beef empanada filling, but the only thing we didn’t have and couldn’t find were the frozen empanada disks.  Why is it that almost every week I have a difficult time finding the main ingredient? We looked in the frozen foods section for about fifteen minutes until we asked one of the employees who showed us the frozen rice and wanton papers section.    Finally, we decided that it was already 7:00, we were hungry and making our own empanada disks would take forever so it wasn’t an option.   In the end, we decided to postpone beef empanada night and make Broiled Salmon with Citrus Yogurt Sauce from the June 2005 issue and accompany it with an apple salad.   It was delicious.

Salmon can easily be over-cooked because it’s all in the timing. Who wants an over-cooked dried out piece of salmon? Depending on the size and the thickness of the fillet, salmon is typically broiled from 3-7 minutes.   Our fillet was very thick on one side and very thin on the other, so seven minutes was just the right amount of time to broil it.

I drizzled some yogurt sauce on top of Mike’s fillet and asked him how it was.

“It tastes lemon-y…”

“Lemon-y? There’s no lemon juice in it!”

And that was the story of that.  I thought the citrus flavor went well with the salmon but it didn’t enhance the flavor or add moisture because I cooked the salmon perfectly.  Its texture was moist and smooth on my palate so the yogurt sauce was unnecessary even though it was good.    Sauces in a salmon dish are there to cover up a really over-cooked dried fillet.  This one was moist, so I wanted to eat my salmon in its natural form.  No Sauce.