Seared Sustainable Arctic Char with a Garden Salad

I really wish my image uploader was working and you could see this fish and salad meal. Instead, I’m going to describe it to you:

Think of light green spinach leaves, peppery arugula, and rippled sacred green basil, freshly pulled from the garden. Add the first tomatoes of the season—bright red and juicy—and sweet mandarine segments. Everything is drizzled in bitter but fruity olive oil with sweet pickled cabbage. And it’s served with a long fillet of thin, pink char. More local than Pacific salmon and from a sustainable operation from Eastern Quebec. A little salt and pepper and a slather of Dijon on a browned, crunchy skin.

Hungry?

Seared Sustainable Arctic Char with a Garden Salad
serves 4

4 fillets sustainable Arctic char (or salmon. Please not Atlantic unless you know the name of the person who caught it)
1/8 tsp salt
1/8 tsp pepper
1 tbsp Dijon mustard
2 tsp oil

2 cups spinach
1 cup sacred basil or purple Thai basil (Italian basil is usually too strong a flavour)
1 cup arugula
1 cup other herb (dill or parsley) or other green (lettuce or mesclun or sorrel)
2-3 mandarine oranges, peeled and segmented
1 large or 8 cherry tomatoes
1/2 cup sweet pickled cabbage or other sweet pickle (carrots or cucumbers or even beets). Or skip the sweet and go with fermented (sauerkraut or kosher dills) or raw, but the pickle has the salt you need to make the salad vinaigrette work
2 tbsp olive oil

First, make the salad. Combine all the fruit and vegetables. Add the olive oil just before serving. Toss to combine. Divide between four plates.

Brush the fish with dijon and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Heat the oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. When hot, add fish, skin-side down. Cook 90 seconds, then flip. Cover and reduce the heat to medium-low for 4 minutes, or until the fish flakes easily with a fork. It should still be a little pink, and fully flaking is actually a little overcooked, says chef Becky Selengut in her cookbook, Good Fish. Highly recommended, by the way.

Place each fillet on a plate with the salad.