Recipe corner - salmon with curried mussels

Whenever I check my recipe page, I am always surprised by the relative dearth of fish recipes on here.  I love fish - all seafood in fact, and often gravitate towards it on menus over meat alternatives.  If a restaurant is offering sea bass, for example, then nine times out of ten that's what I'll pick.  And yet, do I appear to have cooked any sea bass and blogged about it over the past few years?  Not a (fishy) sausage. 

Anyway, this is not a sea bass recipe - actually, I think we're just meant to call it bass now - but it is very, very tasty nonetheless.  The original used twice the amount of butter and a disturbing(ly good) dose of double cream; this version is slightly less....we'll say refined...less creaminess means the curry flavour comes through a little stronger, but the fish can take it.  We actually cooked this with clams the other night as we couldn't get hold of mussels and they worked too and I can imagine it being very nice with prawns - although obviously you'd have to replace the shellfish liquor with a good stock if you went down that route. 

Ingredients

2 medium salmon fillets
Tsp olive oil

500g mussels (weighed with their shells)
90ml white wine
Onion, roughly chopped
Handful of parsley – torn

15g butter

1 onion, finely diced
1 carrot, finely diced
1 celery stick, finely diced
Tbsp curry powder
150g potatoes, finely diced (this equates to around 2 medium potatoes)
50g half fat crème fraiche
Juice of half a lemon

Serves 2, 16 pro points per portion, 9 Smart Points (WW Flex) per portion

In a large saucepan, soften the onion and parsley for a couple of minutes before tipping in the mussels (having debearded them and discarded any damaged ones), the white wine and some seasoning.  Bring to the boil, cover and simmer for around 5 minutes until all the mussels have opened.  Strain over a bowl to collect the liquor and then remove the mussels from their shells.

Melt the butter in a pan and sweat the onion, carrot and celery until nice and soft.  Stir in the curry powder and cook gently for a couple of minutes to take off the raw edge.  Add about 300ml of the retained mussel liquor to the pan, bring to a decent simmer and then add the potatoes and cook until they are soft – about 10 minutes.  Lower the heat and stir through the crème fraiche and the mussels.

Now you can cook your salmon – heat the oil in a non stick frying pan, place the fillet in skin side down and then turn the heat down and cook for around ten minutes, flipping it to the non skin side for the last thirty seconds or so.  This should give you moist, just cooked flesh and a lovely crispy skin.  Serve the salmon, balanced atop the delicious curried mussel and vegetable mix.