TacoCat (kinda) Cooks! #16: Yummy Garlic Salmon Spicy Carbonara! 🍜

Hey Steemit!

We're back with more of our home cooking! If you're unfamiliar with this series, it's where I showcase some of the food we've been making at home since we've been cooking a lot nowadays! Also I'm running out of content so yeah gotta make the most of it!

I've written about this before, but if you didn't know, we make it a point to cook salmon once a week nowadays. Ever since we found out that Sean was lacking in high-density lipoprotein, or good cholesterol, I've been looking up different salmon recipes since it's one of the most affordable and efficient sources of HDL (if you cook it at home).

Source: ecosh

So the other night I wanted to try and make salmon pasta but we've never made a cream-based pasta before and we didn't have much time so we decided to make a simpler version with the instant carbonara we had. I'm always the one who cooks the salmon while Sean is the one who cooks pasta, so we decided to combine our specialties and make a salmon pasta dish!

So these were the ingredients we were using:

• garlic
• salted butter
• salmon fillet
• spinach
• carrot
• salt
• black pepper
• mixed herbs (for garnishing)
• Buldak cream carbonara

This was the salmon fillet I was gonna cook:

And this was the carbonara that Sean would prepare:

I cooked the salmon first since it would take slightly longer. I was going to do a simple garlic butter pan fried salmon though since we only had 1 induction cooker and needed to make the pasta after.

So Step 1: mince the garlic

Step 2: cut the salmon into two fillets and wash them.

Step 3: Pat the fillets dry with a paper towel.

Step 4: Add salt and black pepper to both sides of the fillets.

Step 5: Heat up your pan on high heat and toss in 1 slice of butter.

This was the butter we were using, that has been in our fridge for quite some time.

Step 6: after the butter gets hot, lay down the fillets skin side down.

Step 7: press the fillets down to cook them evenly for a few minutes.

Step 8: After a couple minutes, flip the fillets over to cook on the other side and toss in the garlic.

I kinda forgot that butter will cook the salmon up faster since I normally don't add anything, so they ended up a little more done than I would've liked. But Sean likes his more cooked so it wasn't too bad I suppose.

Once you sautee the garlic until brown, the salmon fillets are done! We set them aside on a plate for now.

While I was cooking the salmon, Sean was preparing the vegetables.

Step 9: cut the carrot

Step 10: boil water for the pasta, add a little bit of salt.

Step 11: once the water is boiled, toss in the vegetables.

While waiting for the vegetables to boil, we opened the instant carbonara packets, which came with a sachet of spicy sauce and powdered cheese. We had tried this brand before, and the spicy sauce is actually really spicy, so we would only be using 1 sachet of each for 2 packets of pasta.

Step 12: boil the instant pasta.

I think the normal boiling time is about 4.5 minutes, and it should be loose but not soggy at that time.

Step 13: drain the pasta but leave a little bit of water.

Step 14: add in the spicy sauce and powdered cheese to the pasta.

Step 15: mix it up!

And once you're done mixing the sauce and cheese until it's well combined, you're ready to serve!

And after plating the pasta with the salmon and garlic and sprinkling some herbs on top, dinner is served!

I gave Sean the slightly more burnt salmon fillet since he likes it super crispy.

And this was my plate!

And it was soooo delicious! The salmon skin was really crispy, and while it was a little more cooked than I would've preferred, at least the flesh wasn't too dry. The pasta was also really nice, slightly spicy with the chewy texture. And it actually meshed well with the garlic salmon! I mixed the garlic in with the pasta too to give it a different flavour and it was amazing!

Overall it was a truly excellent meal! Maybe I'll try to make salmon with a real cream-based pasta next time! I did like the spice from this pasta though, so it will be interesting to find a way to give it some spice.

Thanks so much for reading!

To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!

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Check out my previous post in this series!
TacoCat (kinda) Cooks! #15: Yummy Chinese Omelette and Rice! 🍳