CREAMY VODKA INFUSED SALMON PENNE (Steemit Food Challenge #2)

For the Steemit Food Challenge #2 i would like to share with you my Mum’s all-time favorite dish that she always gets when we go to our favorite Italian restaurant in Phuket: creamy vodka infused salmon penne. I’m not going to lie, it comes very close to my favorite pasta dish, too. I guess the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.

Anywho, I was feeling like whipping something up for a dinner with friends the other day and thought this would be the perfect heartwarming, filling dish.

It definitely was.

The below is a recipe to serve up a dinner for four!

So what you”ll need is….

INGREDIENTS, Serves 4

400 g of Penne Pasta.
40 g of Butter
Half an onion, chopped
1 tbsp Tomato purée
200 g salmon trimmings (smoked or raw, depending on what flavour you prefer).
100 ml Vodka,
250 ml of cream,
a bundle of parsley
a crack of salt and pepper

INSTRUCTIONS

Chop your half onion (try not to cry while you’re at it!).

If you have a food processor, you can just roughly chop it and put it in the food processor and process the onion until almost purée-like. If you do not have a food processor, chop the onion as finely as you can.

Next up Wash and finely chop the parsley while you’re at it, now that you got your chopping elbow grease all warmed up!

Warm a bigger sauce pan with water, add a pinch of salt and bring it to a boil. You will use this for cooking the pasta later on.

Add your butter to another smaller sauce pan and turn up the heat until the butter has melted. Then add the pureed onion.

Then, make that onion sweat for a 3-4 minutes, but only on a low heat.

Take your spoonful of your tomato purée and add it to the buttery onion mixture.

Stir for a few seconds to evenly mix the tomato purée with the onion.

Then add the salmon trimmings and increase the heat to medium.

Stir gently in order to cook the salmon trimmings but without breaking them into tiny pieces for a 3-4 minutes.

Now, the fun part: add the vodka to the pan.

And, inhale. Mmmmmmmm. Give it a good stir until the vodka has fully evaporated and your sauce has thickened a bit.

Next up, pour in that cream, making it look and smell like a delicious creamy goodness!

Turn the sauce back to a low heat and add some salt and pepper, if you like.

Let that creamy goodness simmer and reduce down for about 10 minutes. Make sure you keep stirring occasionally not to let the bottom of the pan burn.

Meanwhile, these 10 minutes should just about be enough time to boil your pasta. So once your water is bubbling away, throw in your Penne pasta into the boiling water.

the pasta al dente (as per the instructions).

Once it is ready drain the penne, quickly throw in your parsley into the salmon vodka sauce, give it a quick stir and bring up the heat for just a few seconds to release those parsley flavours into the sauce, et voila! It is now time to assemble!

Add your pasta back into the bigger sauce pan, pour over your salmon – vodka sauce and stir to make sure all the pasta is coated with the sauce. Plate up and garnish with a bit of extra parsley.

For those cheese inclined, serve up with some parmigiano on the side, it goes really well with the creamy texture of the sauce!

Buon appetito!

Let me tell ya, it went down pretty well!

In fact, so well, that even this one was drooling a little bit.

What a cutie!

I think she gets her food appreciation skills from her mother too!

Lots of love,

Rosalina