My wife and I hosted a brunch recently, and one of the dishes we served was smoked salmon on toast points. We had a lot of salmon left over, and we wanted to use it for dinner. After some brainstorming, we whipped up a simple dish combining smoked salmon, sun-dried tomatoes, shallots and wilted arugula.
All of the flavors really go great together, and a little smoked salmon goes a long ways. The dish almost tastes like you’re eating pasta with bacon, rather than fish. I think in the future I’ll be buying smoked salmon specifically to make this dish. It’s another great addition to the one-bowl meal canon.
Serves two for dinner.
Ingredients:
- 1 1/2-2 cups fusilli pasta
- 3 1/2-4 ounces smoked salmon
- 3-4 tablespoons shallots, diced fine (half a large shallot bulb)
- 1/3 cup sun-dried tomatoes
- 3-4 generous handfuls of fresh arugula (enough to fill a medium frying pan)
- Balsamic vinegar
Step 1. Cook the pasta until just done in salted water. Return to the pot.
Step 2. While the pasta is cooking, saute the shallots with a pat of butter.
Step 3. In the same pan, cook down the arugula with a splash of olive oil or a little more butter until the greens are wilted but the stems retain a little crunch – less than 2 minutes.
Step 4. Add the shallots, arugula and tomatoes to the pot with the cooked pasta. I like using sun-dried tomatoes that have been thinly sliced so you don’t get too big a bite of a tomato. Include a little bit of the oil used to store the tomatoes.
Step 5. Add the smoked salmon to the pot, torn into bite-sized pieces. Top it with a few glugs of balsamic vinegar and stir everything together. The arugula tends to clump together; you may have to separate the leaves by hand to get it evenly distributed.
Serve and enjoy! Because you don’t have to cook any meat, this is really a dish that can be completed in the time it takes to boil water and cook pasta. This meal doesn’t need to be served piping hot, either.
