one filipino dish a week

Weeknight cooking session is always an adventure. Most nights it’s a game of what’s in the refrigerator that I can semi put together. Tonight I felt like getting a little bit fancy and experiment. I had salmon and some pandan leaves that I had bought from the Asian store. Pandan is usually used for its fragrance and is added in rice and some desserts. I got the idea for this dish from a dish from Cafe Laguna in Cebu that I remembered… pandan chicken. I did some digging and it seemed like this had Thai origins. So boo hoo this is not a Filipino dish. Anyway, I wanted to recreate that but with salmon. Here’s how I did it:

2 pieces salmon fillet cut into smaller pieces
8 pieces pandan leaves
2T kalamansi (from frozen packets) or lemon
1 T butter
salt and pepper to taste

A rather short list of ingredients like most of my weeknight meals. I seasoned the fish and marinated it in the kalamansi juice for a few minutes. I wrapped each piece of fish in the pandan leaves. Pre-heated the oven to 375degrees. I heated up a pan and melted the butter. I fried the fish skin side down until the leaves started to brown and part of the fish starts to cook (~5 minutes). I turned the fish and put the pan in the pre-heated oven for about 10 minutes or until the middle of the fish looked opaque (~10 minutes).

I was actually amazed that this experiment worked out quite well. The fragrance of the pandan leaves imparted itself on the salmon. What really surprised me was the way I tasted white wine with this mixture. I think the kalamansi, pandan, salmon juice and butter had this very sauvignon blanc-esque taste to it. It was quite intriguing and I was very pleased. Sometimes experiments work.