This meal all started because Annie gave me a wonderful Christmas present: The Sriracha Cookbook. You’ve probably seen Sriracha at your local asian restaurant, and you may know it as “rooster sauce” – or if you don’t know it, its basically an asian hot sauce made with chiles and garlic and its ohhh so good. And you need it for the recipe that follows.
So the Sriracha Cookbook, as one might expect, is chock full of recipes that include Sriracha in them. I picked the Miso-Sriracha Glazed Salmon recipe for dinner, mostly because we already had miso paste and Sriracha in our house. The recipe in the book tells you to serve it atop steamed rice, but I wanted to do something more interesting, so I found a great recipe on Martha Stewart.com that I adapted to include the miso-Sriracha salmon. Its a wonderful rice bowl that includes salmon, orange slices, and sugar snap peas atop some brown rice with a great orange sauce and mint to sprinkle on top of it all. It tasted so light and substantial at the same time, and was a wonderful meal in a bowl!
A note on the rice: I actually used a rice called Camargue Red Rice, which Annie’s mom brought us from the south of France, where it grows. The package had no English on it so I actually had to get online and do a little research before cooking it. Anyway, it was delicious but I don’t think its necessary to make this dish great, so I put brown rice in the recipe below.
Spicy Miso Salmon and Citrus Rice Bowl
Ingredients
Spicy Miso Salmon
1 1/2 Tb. toasted sesame oil
1/4 cup brown sugar
2 Tb. soy sauce
2 Tb. white miso paste
1 1/2 Tb. Sriracha
1 clove garlic, minced
1 lb. salmon fillet(s)
Citrus Rice Bowl
4 oranges (I used Valencia)
A 1-inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled and thinly sliced
1 bay leaf
1 tsp. coriander seeds
1 Tb. rice vinegar
1 tsp. soy sauce
1 tsp. honey
1 tsp. toasted sesame oil
1 cup uncooked brown rice
1 1/2 cups sugar snap peas
1/4 cup fresh mint, chopped, for garnish
sliced green onions, green part only, for garnish
Instructions
Cook the rice according to the package directions. I added a bit of chopped garlic and butter into 3 1/3 cups of water, brought it to a boil, and then simmered for about an hour.
In a small mixing bowl, make the Spicy Miso Salmon glaze: combine the oil, brown sugar, soy sauce, miso paste, Sriracha, and garlic. Set aside.
Peel and separate 2 oranges into individual boats. Now comes the hard part: you are supposed to detach and discard the membranes in order to get to the meat of the orange slice. I experimented a lot during this step, and eventually found that I could cut down the back of each orange segment, pull it apart, and pull off the membrane from each side. You could just skip this step entirely, but the orange slices won’t look as pretty, and you won’t get the same taste. Regardless, put these orange segments in a bowl and set aside.
Remove the stems from the sugar snap peas, rinse, and chop into 1/2-inch pieces (I just chopped each pod in half). Set aside.
Now juice the remaining 2 oranges into a small saucepan, and add the sliced ginger and bay leaf. Crush the coriander seeds with the side of a knife and add them to the orange juice mixture, then bring to a boil. Cook the mixture until it reduces to about 2/3 cup, about 6 minutes. Take it off the heat and let it cool, then strain into a bowl to get rid of the ginger, bay leaf, and seeds. Now whisk in the vinegar, soy sauce, honey, and oil.
Preheat the broiler to high. Lay the salmon fillet(s) across an aluminum foil-lined broiling pan (or any baking sheet with a rim). Take out the glaze you made in step 2 and spread it generously on top of the salmon. Broil the salmon 6 inches from the flame (or heat coil, as the case may be), until the fish flakes easily, about 10 minutes. I spread more of the glaze on the fish after 5 minutes of broiling.
Dish the rice into bowls, and top with salmon, peas, and orange segments. Garnish with mint and green onion slices. Reheat the orange sauce/mixture if it needs reheating, and drizzle it generously over everything.
Enjoy!
