Nourishing Salmon Green Bowl!

Hey guys! This week we learned all about nutrition and nourishment! It was fitting to make a dish that hit all the important nutrition categories in one go. One of the main elements of a nourish bowl is the planning process, keeping a table or chart of the important aspects of a meal and filling in the boxes as you go really helps ensure the nourish bowl is the healthiest it can be. My group had difficulty deciding on protein and basically every little thing being put in our dish because everyone just had such different taste buds haha! So, make sure that if you are making this with or for multiple people that you keep in mind everyone’s taste preferences. In the end we decided on quinoa, lentils, raw salmon, edamame, spinach, cucumbers, and sriracha mayo. Temperature is also a big contributor to the dish, it’s important to consider if you want a cold dish, a warm dish, or a hot dish. If you were to combine cold raw fish with piping hot vegetables, then it wouldn’t sit quite well together. You also want to make sure the ingredients actually taste well together; we went with classic poke bowl type ingredients knowing that these have worked together in the past and so we were quite sure it would turn out fine. If you are trying new combinations of foods go for it! But be aware that if refried beans don’t turn out great with raw salmon that it might not have been the best idea from the start. A big part of the dish, personally, was the grain, it’s important to make the grain properly or else the entire meal will be ruined. A safe choice is brown rice, it’s healthy and has a nice texture, but if you want to be a bit more adventurous, you could try quinoa, millet, or amaranth. Keep in mind that if you don’t cook these properly, they might not taste quite as good as they should, and it’ll be under all the delicious toppings so try it before you begin assembling your poke bowl. We decided on quinoa and lentils and though they were cooked fine, we forgot to rinse them out leaving a soapy feel and taste to it which tainted the dish a little. Now one of the main reasons people find nourish bowls so trendy right now is because of all the beautiful colours and placement of each ingredient! It’s important that you have an aesthetic to your bowl, whether that’s using bright red beets or using golden crispy chicken, there should be colour popping everywhere that compliment and make each other look good. Our dish was a green dish that highlighted the beautiful pink salmon laying on top, add a dash of sriracha mayo and the dish looked amazing. For assembling it’s important to have a vision for it, you might want to make everything the same shape or have a variety of sizes and shapes, you might want to make everything bite sized or keep them long. There are many options to how you can plate the dish and it’s important, especially if you are in a time crunch, to figure out the layout beforehand. Our group had some miscommunication with how to cut the salmon and so half of it had been cut into small cubes and the other half slices, it took up time from our class and caused delay in cleanup. The best thing about this dish was that it doesn’t require that much cooking depending on what you choose to put in! The main skills we needed were knife skills for cutting up all the ingredients and plating. This dish worked really well, and, in the future, it can be easily adapted into many different ingredients that all require different levels of skill. If you choose chicken next you can learn to marinade and sear, if you choose to spiralize the veggies you can practice using the machine. There are many different things you can do with this dish and it can only be improved with each time you make it!

Recipe

Ingredients:

- 2 Cups - Quinoa

- 1 Cup - Lentils

- 1 Medium Cucumber

- 2 Avocados

- 1 Cup - Baby Spinach

- 2 1/2 Cups - Edamame

- 1 Salmon Fillet

- 2 Tbsp - Soy Sauce

- 1 Tbsp - Sesame Oil

- 1 Tbsp - Mayonnaise

- 1 Teaspoon - Sriracha

Directions:

1. Prepare quinoa with lentils and boil for 10 minutes, dice cucumbers, boil edamame for 5 minutes, mix sriracha and mayo, and marinade (soy sauce and sesame oil) and slice the salmon fillet.

2. Assemble!