We have a mint plant that is very generous with its leaves. Meaning, we can’t use it fast enough. We also have a basil plant we got from Trader Joe’s which needed to be cut back a bit. So, I started looking for new ideas of uses for them. It just so happened that we also bought a large salmon steak earlier in the week. After searching the internet for inspiration, I settled on this simple recipe.
Ingredients
- 1 piece of salmon (or steelhead trout)
- 1/2 cup fresh mint leaves
- 1/2 cup fresh basil leaves
- 4 cloves of garlic, chopped
- 1/4 cup olive oil
- 1/2 lemon juiced
- 1/2 lemon zest
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1/4 teaspoon pepper
Directions
Make your pesto by chopping your mint and basil leaves and put into a food processor. Add the chopped garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, lemon zest, salt and pepper. Mix all ingredients together until you have a pesto consistency.
Coat your salmon with the pesto and let sit for at least 20 minutes in the refrigerator.
Heat your grill to high heat.
Place the salmon on a cedar plank or a grill plate. We don’t have any cedar planks so we just lightly sprayed non-stick oil on a grill plate and put the salmon on the plate in the center of the grill. Cook the salmon for 20 minutes over medium-high heat.
After a few minutes, our grill started to flare up, which is common for our grill. To resolve this, I turned off the heat directly under the salmon and then turned on the outer burners to high. Our grill cooks very hot so this was more than enough heat for our salmon.
We didn’t use all the pesto on the salmon and had some leftover. We used it to coat some zucchini noodles as a side dish. We also served it with some lentils. It was a great, easy dinner.