Maple Baked Salmon

It was a good start with this Maple Baked Salmon for Valentine's lunch. It was salmon melting in your mouth experience. I served with a piece of lemon wedge and baked fingerings.

*This recipe is based on NYT cooking. This story is about MY experience of the recipe.*
In the midst of Covid 19, life still goes on. It's been almost a year since it started! Regardless of the pandemic, days were coming and going and It was almost Valentine's day. I wanted to make it festive and special. We need something to lighten up our too quiet and duck down days.

For Valentine's meals, I wanted something not too complicated to cook, special but still familiar, delicious and healthy that everyone would enjoy including my hard to satisfy young sophisticated food critics. It seemed challenging to find a recipe that meet these criteria but it didn't take that long to land on one.

I googled Valentine's easy recipe and there it was! A New York Times news article titled "19 Easy Recipes for Valentine's Day". I have to say, I'm in favor of NYT cooking to begin with from their promising and easy to follow recipe. I've eaten a couple of their salads(I wasn't a salad person at all back then!) from a couple of pot luck dinner. I was always amazed by its clean yet delicious flavor. Having that experience led me to trust their recipes and seeing photos from the article already made me drool. So many mouth watering options were there. I've picked 2 desert recipes and 2 meal recipes.

This then became my Valentine's lunch dish. We regularly have salmon. Either pan fried or baked with simple salt, pepper and some basic herbs(either rosemary or tarragon). It's familiar but the sauce goes on top is new! Normally we would have salmon with baked broccoli and carrots but this time I switched to baked fingerings with rosemary. It was visibly appealing and made my kids curious on the food. It was cooked just right. The salmon was melting in our mouth. All of us finished our dish in no time.