Grilled salmon with lime butter

It all started when I forgot to buy lemons at the store. We'd settled on salmon fillet for a weeknight dinner, so I stopped at The Fishery for the salmon and some green beans. We usually have lemons in the fruit bowl but we had run out and I forgot to replenish the supply. All I had was one sorry little lime and a dried half-lime in the fridge.

Daderot via Wikimedia Commons

This is where the fathomless depths of the Internet come in handy. Click to Epicurious, search "salmon lime" and the first recipe to pop up is Grilled Salmon with Lime Butter -- 4-1/2 forks and 93% would make it again. The salmon is easy -- salt, pepper, slap on grill -- and the butter almost as easy -- purree 1/4 cup lime juice, a chopped garlic clove, salt and pepper then dribble in 1 stick of melted butter while running the blender until the whole is emulsified. I used the indoor option for grilling -- the ridged grill pan we bought for some of the Ottolenghi recipes -- and finished in the oven.

The lime butter was divine and would make anything taste good (and, yes, there was plenty left over for another meal). The salmon -- we just get the Canadian farm salmon, tastes good to us -- had enough scorched flavor to set off the citrusy, buttery sauce. An extra fillip came from the lime zest sprinkled over the cooked salmon.

Unaltered photo by McKay Savage under Creative Commons license

For the beans, I wanted to use the can of San Marzano tomatoes con basilico that I accidentally opened to make sauce Bolognese earlier in the week, and didn't use because I wanted to keep to Marcella's perfect recipe. Click on Epicurious, search "green beans tomato basil" and up pops Green Beans Braised with Tomato and Basil, with an equally good rating. A half onion kept in the fridge supplied the 1 cup of chopped onion, which went with 2 minced garlic cloves into 3 tablespoons of olive oil to soften, then add 1-1/2 pounds trimmed green beans, 1 cup chopped tomato, 1 cup basil leaves, and 1/2 cup water. I used my canned tomatoes with the basil included and supplemented with some dried basil. The beans were mature, so took longer (and more water) than the 10 minutes prescribed in the recipe. The canned tomatoes probably produced a more concentrated tomato flavor than the fresh ones called for in the recipe (certainly than any available at this time of the year) so the complaint of some commenters that this dish was bland didn't apply. It actually was a great accompaniment to the salmon.

Not only was this a surprisingly elegant weeknight meal, I used up stuff from the fridge in a nicely serendipitous fashion.