Lunch Date: Tuscan Butter Salmon

As I posted in my Letter to My Kids: Let's Talk About Mother's Day post, I see my kids a lot. My boys work at a health food-grocery store about a mile away and they each stop in before/after work quite often. My oldest son Kainan has been bringing steak for us to cook lately, so we've been experimenting with side dishes. He is done with work at 1:00 pm so it's a perfect time for lunch.

This week, we were actually inspired by one of those recipe videos from facebook. You know, the ones that you share and then never make? No? Is that just me? Well anyway, Kainan was actually drooling over this one enough that he remembered it for this week. He had me send him a list so he could pick up stuff from work. We had everything except the salmon and heavy cream already, so Yay!

This was the recipe: Tuscan Butter Salmon

I happened to have most of the ingredients on hand, but I can tell you now, we wished that we'd added at least three times the tomatoes to this dish. I rarely follow recipes, but since I have only made salmon ONCE in my life and I've never actually cooked shrimp... I followed the recipe pretty closely.

The garlic was the perfect compliment to the cream and parmesan. I couldn't quite picture them all together, but it was fantastic. I'm glad I didn't 'wing it' with this, because I always use a ton of garlic in things. This was the perfect amount for this dish.

Kainan brought shrimp as well, because he thought it sounded good. I thought he was insane, because shrimp just tastes like the grisly parts of chicken legs to me... but hey, whatever floats his boat. He's buying, after all.

Mmmmm... this reminded me of the homemade bread and bruschetta that I often make in the spring and summer once Patrick's tomatoes start getting ripe. We go through SO many tomatoes in the summer. Seriously. Last time he planted, he had 80 tomato plants and I think we ended up having only enough extra to make salsa one time. We just pretty much devoured them as soon as they were picked.

It was fine, but I wish I'd have chopped up the spinach more and maybe not put it in until the sauce was almost done cooking. I like spinach in just about everything (I use it daily), but I don't care for it when it's overcooked quite as much. It might have even been good as more of a salad with fresh greens topped with the creamy alfredo style sauce on top.

Once the sauce cooked down a bit, it was super thick and creamy. The garlic and orgeano added just a touch of flavor to complement it perfectly. Personally, though, I think I might have chosen to have it with chicken instead. Salmon is great, but I'm not sure I liked the flavor combination as much as I would with something like chicken. The salmon we had was pretty strong, flavor-wise and kind of overpowered the sauce.

The tomatoes were AMAZING, but as I said above, there were FAR too few of them. We both commented several times that having a tomato with every bite would have been divine :)