New Year's Eve: Greek Salad, Potatoes, and Oven-Roasted Salmon

Friday night was New Year’s Eve, and, to celebrate, we had a dinner I’m now realizing would have been perfect for Christmas Eve, exactly one week before. By popular request, I took on a Greek theme for the night’s dishes, and now that I’m actually sitting down to write these recipes for the blog, I’m having the realization that this would have been a perfect inclusion on Christmas Eve’s Feast of the Seven Fish, if we’d done that exactly one week before.

The starch accompanying the meal Friday night was about 2 pounds of the Signature Potatoes. That by far takes the longest to finish—about an hour and 10 minutes. Cut, season, and toss the potatoes according to the recipe, and then immediately begin working on the following dish.

The festivities on the 31st began with a Greek salad. As with almost any salad, the hardest part of a Greek salad’s assembly is the preparation of its dressing. I’ve already covered how to make vinaigrette emulsion dressings on this blog, so rather than explaining the whole process again here, I’ll just link to that post so you can reach it by clicking here. Two major changes were made to that process: 1) the exclusion of raw minced or pressed garlic and 2) the addition of several herbs common in Greek cuisine as seasonings in the vinaigrette, including dried basil, oregano, dill, and mustard powder.

It’s always been my philosophy when making a salad that the dressing should always be complete well in advance of any of the other components. This serves two purposes: first, it allows me o check that the emulsion I’ve made is actually stable (and to fix it if it isn’t) and to allow the flavors to meld and interact with each other, thereby creating a dressing far more complex than the sum of its parts. If the dressing is stable—and I have to confess that mine wasn’t initially stable, but that’s fine because there is a way to fix that! (first by adding more mustard, and then by adding more oil very, very slowly)— it can sit indefinitely, and it won’t split.

When I judged that the potatoes were about half-done, I pulled 3 sockeye salmon fillets I had been thawing in cold water out of the water, removed them from the packaging, Adam Ragusea has a pretty good way of classifying the three general shapes of salmon fillets, as “car,” “flat,” or “tail” pieces. I posted another salmon recipe a few months ago where I seared salmon in the pan. The first category are much longer than they are wide, and, on the profile, they kind of look like a sedan: not very much fish at the front where the “engine” is, lots of fish in the middle “where the people sit inside the car” and not much fish where the “trunk” is. The second category comes from the middle of the side of the fish and looks most like a slice of a cube: from above, it looks like a square, but it’s not a cube, since its much thinner, but the virtue of this piece is that it is almost uniform in its thickness. The third piece is, like the “car” distinctive in its shape: you can very easily tell it came from the back of the fish because one end looks like it would’ve been connected to a flat piece and the other end tapers almost to a point.

That method of pan-searing works best with “car” pieces. They’re the ones that cook the most quickly and most unevenly, so it’s definitely a good thing to be watching those pieces the whole time as they cook on the stove rather than letting them cook unattended in an oven for a longer period. But in this case, and in most cases, I get bags of fish that have mostly flat or tail pieces. That was certainly the case on New Year's Eve, so this oven method is perfect.

Line an oven-safe pan with aluminum foil. It is always better to cook fish skin-on (because already-skinless fish will immediately disintegrate into its flakes when you pick it up, thereby ruining the presentation). Because we’re not searing the skin as we would in the other pan method, the skin will come right off—but the fillet will stay intact and presentable—at the end of the cooking process in the oven. Place the fillets in that pan in one layer, and being careful not to touch the fish so as not to contaminate the dressing, spoon some of the Greek vinaigrette onto the fish. Once the fish have been dressed, place them in the oven with the potatoes. Time this so that the fish and the potatoes will be done around the same time. The fish needs about 20-25 minutes to cook, plus 5 minutes to rest (in the oven, with the oven turned off), and the potatoes usually take about an hour.

While the fish is in the oven, begin working on assembling the salad, but do not dress it with what remains of the Greek vinaigrette yet. Cut, wash and dry one head of Romaine lettuce. Wash one cucumber. Wash, dry, and then cut a cucumber in half along its length and then again in a perpendicular direction. This will create four quarters, each of which, when cut, will create half-moons of cucumber. Wash and dry 1 pint of grape tomatoes. Remove Kalamata olives from their brine and cut them to your liking. Crumble 4 ounces of feta cheese into the vegetables. Combine well. Only when the fish and the potatoes are ready to come out of the oven (cooked and rested), dress the salad and toss again.

Serve.