Soy-Glazed Salmon with Quick-Pickled Cucumber Salad

Rachel SimpsonI already loved Gail Simmons before I made this soy-glazed salmon recipe, but I love her even more now. This dish was a huge hit; and a real treat for us for dinner on a day I didn't want to cook some variation of the same old thing.

My husband is not a huge fan of fish, he says, but he makes an exception for well cooked salmon. My daughter and I love it. We'll eat salmon poached, broiled, grilled, smoked, any way you want to give it to us. I have friends who fish for salmon off the Leelanau Peninsula in Michigan and I drool over their catches. If I lived closer, they say, I could have some of their catch. I have considered moving.

For this, I was lucky enough to get the last piece of wild salmon at the fish store -- so beautifully deep pink and so ... I don't know what the word is – tender? Even uncooked, it just sort of melted when I put my finger in it.

The only ingredient I lacked was the sesame seeds -- I swore I had some but must have thrown them out during the last great spice shelf purge. They're on the shopping list now. I used cukes from our farm share in the salad.

That salad was a great combination of spice and acid -- it wasn't the greatest taste on its own but you could really sense its potential. A bite of the cold salad with the warm salmon, though, was heavenly. The sweetish soy glaze and the tangy cukes came together in a pretty amazing way.

My daughter tasted the cukes by themselves first and told us "eh, I don't like the cukes -- too sweet and spicy." I urged her to try them with the fish and that changed. "It's so different!," she said. She had two helpings -- heavy on the cukes on the second helping.

The salmon skin was a big hit with my husband -- in a rare moment of unmitigated praise he told us "I really, really like the crunchy, caramelized skin." After dinner I caught him picking all the little bits up out of the pan.

And of course the salmon itself was delicious. There is nothing like wild salmon. I'm a bit spoiled -- it's hard for me to make the "regular" stuff.

Aside from the lack of sesame seeds I didn't change the recipe at all -- the salmon cooked perfectly in the time specified, which I think is a rarity in a recipe, unless you're baking -- and as suggested I used white vinegar because I didn't have rice wine vinegar. My biggest problem was making the rice look like it does in the picture -- I don't have one of those ring-mold things. And I stink at artistically drizzling sauce on the plate. But who cares? This is definitely on the make-this-again list.

Make the soy-glazed salmon recipe.