Salmon is one of those dishes I love and could eat every week. My husband and son are never excited about salmon and don’t think they like it – until I make a good one. We were all pretty skeptical about feta cheese on salmon (I have a strict no cheese on fish rule), but the thing I love most about Half Baked Harvest recipes is the way Teighan Gerard combines unexpected ingredients into something magical. I love every almost every ingredient in this recipe (olives? No thanks!), so I took a leap of faith with the Greek Salmon and Zucchini with Salty Feta from Half Baked Harvest Super Simple.
Should you make this Greek Salmon?
Yes and no. The combination of ingredients and flavors is spot on. Cooking the salmon in parchment made for a pretty presentation, but I didn’t see the benefit over just slow roasting or cooking in the sous vide (my usual method.)
The potatoes and zucchini, on the other hand, did not benefit from parchment. Some of them were still raw and the ones that weren’t were a bit soggy. It’s the one complaint I have with this cookbook – the photos don’t always represent the actual technique used. There’s no way cooking these veggies in parchment will get the nice browned edges the photo shows. They are being steamed and wind up in a puddle of liquid at the bottom of the packet.
TL:DR: Skip the parchment, and try this as a sheet pan dinner. Alternatively, cooks the potatoes and zucchini in the air fryer like I did.
Pro Tips for Lazy/Busy People
The parchment bags she suggests actually do make things a bit easier. I always underestimate the size of parchment I need from a roll, so this definitely helped.
Use a mandolin for the potatoes and zucchini. Also, I had impulse bought a small mandolin at IKEA a few months before, and forgotten about it. I finally busted it out for this recipe and it was a game changer.
Full Disclosure: Things I Did Different
As previously noted, I hate olives. It’s one of the few foods I truly dislike, and Kalamata are some of the worst offenders in my opinion. My husband loves them though, so for this recipe I just add them at the end.
Because I’ve made this recipe before, I knew the potatoes and zucchini would not come out to my liking. I doubled the amount, and cooked the second batch in the air fryer.
I also gave the salmon a few minutes under the broiler at the end to brown the top.
