Tandoori Salmon

My next recipe is from a Waitrose card and here is the original recipe.

Now I don't shop at Waitrose on a regular basis, so I had to skip the recommended ingredients and find replacements. Looking at the comment on the original recipe, this turned out to be a good thing. However, I did use the recommended amount of potatoes and ended up with quite a lot left over. I also used the recommended amount of yoghurt and it was way too much for the amount of salmon.

Ingredients
Serves 2

about 1 kg of potatoes suitable for mashing
3 tsp tandoori spice mix
300 g Greek style yoghurt
250 g salmon fillet, skin removed
225 g small plum tomatoes on the vine
1 tbsp onion seeds
salt and pepper to taste

Method

1. Peel, wash and boil or steam the potatoes until tender
   
2. Pre-heat the oven to 200 ° C and line a tray with baking paper.
3. Mix together the tandoori spice mix with 100 g of the yoghurt, then coat the salmon generously and place on the tray.
4. Wash the tomatoes, but keep them on the vine, then place next to the salmon and bake for about 25 - 30 minutes, until the salmon is ready and the tomatoes are soft.
5. When the potatoes are ready, transfer to a large bowl, add the remaining 200 g yoghurt, onion seeds, salt and pepper and blend until smooth. Adjust the seasoning if needed.
6. If the salmon isn't ready yet, transfer the mash to an oven proof dish with a lid and keep warm next to the salmon and tomatoes.

This turned out to be very tasty, although it was a touch on the sour side overall, due to the yoghurt. But as I write up this recipe, I've realised that I used way too much of the tandoori paste, halving it would have given a better result.

The tandoori spice mixture was quite good. The instructions on the packet were to use one part of spice mixture to 13 parts of yoghurt, but I decided to ignore that. Though perhaps the 3 tsp I used with 100 g yoghurt might have been just that anyway. There was quite a nice kick to it as well and it's a shame that it also said to use for cooking only, not to eat "raw", so I can't use this mixture as a dip.

The mashed potatoes were also very nice and I'm glad I made the full amount. I've made mashed potatoes with crème fraîche before, which was very nice, but with Greek yoghurt it's even healthier. The reason I used onion seeds is that there were no fresh chives in the supermarket and I didn't have any frozen ones either. The onion seeds softened up while I kept them warm in the oven and infused nicely with the mashed potatoes. Otherwise, 25 g of fresh finely cut chives would probably be nice too.

Lundulph certainly liked this dish as did I and it's a shame there was no salmon left over for seconds. The tomatoes were quite a nice surprise as well, the flavour was quite different to what I expected. Much sweeter and really tasty and worked perfectly with the tandoori salmon and mash. I'm glad I followed the recipe on this one, as I'm not a fan of cooked tomatoes in general.