Salmon and Noodles with Sweet Chili and Coriander Butter

Now, doesn’t that sound like a cheffy kind of dinner?

That’s because the recipe was created by Jean Paul Giraud, the chef at the Millennium Hotel Glasgow. The Millennium and Copthorne Hotels group asked some bloggers to try and recreate the dish at home, and kindly sent us bags of quality ingredients to make it so.

Note: in case that wasn’t explicit enough, Millenium and Copthorne sent me all the ingredients to make this blog post possible, through the ever-capable middle men at the Joe Blogs Blogger Network. All opnions and thoughts are, as ever, my own .

I was expecting a box or a bag of ingredients, so I arranged to have them delivered to me at work. Imagine my surprise, and the bafflement of the people behind reception, when a Sainsbury’s delivery man showed up with four bags of shopping, including a whole bottle of wine. No, go ahead and imagine it. I hustled (and rustled) back to my desk slightly red-faced after collecting that lot. They really pushed the boat out, sending me top quality ingredients, and plenty of them. For example, the recipe calls for an ounce of ginger – I now have enough ginger in my kitchen to start up a ginger ale production line.

You can find the recipe on the Millennium Hotels website. I will say that it’s not the best-written recipe, especially if you’re not an experienced cook. You may have questions like how much coriander should I use? What length of time constitutes a decent ‘sweating’ for the ginger? Why is there a lemon in the ingredients and not in the instructions? What am I supposed to do with this lemon?!

The answers to those are: a big handful, a few minutes and I don’t know, my friend. But you know what they say. When life gives you lemons…

Life actually gave me a bag of lemons on this occasion, none of which ended up in the dinner. That’s certainly enough for lemonade.

 

 

Other than these grey areas, the recipe went really well, and I felt proper fancy serving this up. One thing to note: the recipe calls for sakura cress, which I would have substituted with mustard cress. In among my unexpectedly large amount of shopping was a bag of watercress, which actually tasted great with the salmon and ginger and looked pretty, to boot. I sprinkled it over the top before serving. Watercress doesn’t need much by way of cooking before it wilts away into nothingness. I also added a few garnishing leaves of coriander. That’s just how I roll.

 

 

The gist of the recipe is this: you fry some salmon fillets, then remove to the oven to finish cooking, or just to keep warm if your fillets are thin. Then you cook up a good dose of ginger, spring onion and red pepper in the same pan (I used a wok instead of a saute pan – it gave me more space to work), and toss in a little butter and some noodles. These, too, are removed and set aside to keep warm while you reduce white wine, sweet chili sauce, coriander into a fragrant sauce, then add in some butter to emulsify.

This is why restaurant food tastes so good – butter in everything.

 

 

The end result was a really great dinner. You could try serving some garlicky pak choi as a side dish, and next time I’d definitely put in extra spring onion. The recipe called for just one – I used two, so they wouldn’t be lonely, but they got a little lost among the crowd of noodles and peppers. The sauce was a revelation – I’d never had thought to combine sweet chili sauce and wine, but it really works. The butter thickens it up, and adds a touch of richness, but still lets the flavours that are already there shine through.

I encourage you to give the recipe a try – if you do, you can tweet your results with the #TOTTChef hashtag.

Thanks to Millennium and Copthorne, and to the Joe Bloggs Network, for hooking me up!