Roasted Salmon & Lentils

If we learned anything from this week's recipe, it was to get our "A game" on when it comes to shopping for the French Friday ingredients......
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Per Nana~

Unfortunately this recipe was off to a bad start when I could

 not find the French green lentils, known as lentils du Puy. 

 I was absolutely certain that Wegman's would carry them in

 their international section, but the best I could find were organic

 "green lentils" which looked exactly the same as the bag of Goya

 lentils but cost twice the price.  I have eaten lentils

du Puy before and they are much better tasting.

That said, cooking the lentils with the vegetables and clove were

 really not to my taste.  As a matter of fact, they were tasteless.  

I cooked them the required minutes and discarded

the black liquid as Dorie states in the recipe, but they turned to

 mush.  Hubby and I enjoy lentils, I cook them often, but we

 were not pleased with this recipe.

I baked the salmon as instructed and that was really delicious.  

The combination of lentils and salmon is nice, however, if I had the 

French lentils it would have turned out better.

Per Tricia~

I have had really good and really bad lentil dishes, so I was 

curious to see where this one would land.  And like mother, like daughter -

 I failed to get the requisite green lentils as well.  In Nana's defense, 

she did talk me out of buying the split peas which were located next to 

the standard lentils and looked oh so amazingly as though they would 

pass for green lentils.  When I called Nana from the "lentil aisle" she 

talked me out of this madness.

As I prepped the recipe I did find that it seemed to be a bit tedious

 in the number of steps, but that is usually directly related to how tired 

I am at the time and how close I am to the Dorie deadline.  But I will say 

that by the time I had to fish the cooked veggies OUT of the lentil broth

 to isolate them and chop them up.....I was beginning to wonder who 

thought up this whole process in the first place.

Other than the number of dirty kitchen items involved, the results 

were the next surprise.  I expected my husband to be quite impressed 

but he was disappointed in the lack of taste.  Surprised even.  He said he

 could not believe how bland the dish tasted after the wonderful aroma.

  Incredulous, he even added that with the amount of onion in the dish he 

at least expected to taste that ingredient.

On the other spectrum, my younger son who had announced as he saw

 the "Dorie ingredients" that he hated lentils...sat down and ate an entire plate.  

I didn't dare question him while eating for fear of distracting him. 

 But I did ask him if he would like me to make it again and he said definitely.

  Go figure. 

 I personally enjoyed the texture of the lentils with the salmon 

and would consider revisiting this one.  Especially since I have all this fresh 

parsley left over because I forgot to use it......