Inspired by
Brother Bear
Growing up with a surname with “bear” in it, you get attached to the bear-eaque names a lot. After time you get attached to bears and have your favourites. The brown bear isn’t one of my favourites, but Brother Bear is one of my favourite bear movies, sitting just under Pixar’s Brave, but nicely above The Jungle Book. Brother Bear has music by Phil Collins and having loved his style in Tarzan, I loved his songs in this movie too. Perhaps one of my favourites is Welcome, where Kenai is adjusting to the Bear family during the Salmon run scene.
With this scene in mind, I decided to pick Salmon as my dish. As the movie is set in Alaska, it was only fitting to choose Wild Alaskan Salmon fillets as the main ingredient. I’m a big fan of salmon dishes so mixing the textures with the pine nuts, mustard and dill gave a great balance between fillet and flavour.
Kenai River Salmon
The ingredients for this dish were picked to match the Paleo diet. The Paleolithic diet, or caveman diet, is a modern fad diet requiring the sole or predominant eating of foods presumed to have been available to humans during the Paleolithic era. Brother Bear is set in a post ice age era so I felt matching the meal with this diet seemed quite fitting. Whilst I did not make my own mustard, the flavours of it pull through and definitely add to the quality of the dish.
A great side to this dish is a simple side salad. The salad certainly helped mask some of the strong mustard tones, where the helping was a little thick. You can optionally make this a main meal by adding some seasonal vegetables and oven baked potato wedges, which I ended up doing so that I could have the meal as a dinner time meal.
Preheat oven to 200ºC. Like a baking tray with parchment paper. Pat dry the salmon with some kitchen roll and lay the fillets out across your baking tray.
Brush the tops of the salmon with mustard. Try not to leave it too thick so the taste isn’t too overpowered, however you want it thick enough that the other ingredients sit on top.
In a small bowl, combine the rest of the ingredients for the dill and pine nut topping. Press the topping on the salmon, using the mustard to help it stick. Then bake in the oven for 12-15 minutes, depending on the thickness of the salmon, until the fish is flaky.
Plate up with your side salad adding a little extra lemon juice to your salmon. Serve optionally with seasonal vegetables and/or potato wedges.
Ingredients
Directions
Preheat oven to 200ºC. Like a baking tray with parchment paper. Pat dry the salmon with some kitchen roll and lay the fillets out across your baking tray.
Brush the tops of the salmon with mustard. Try not to leave it too thick so the taste isn’t too overpowered, however you want it thick enough that the other ingredients sit on top.
In a small bowl, combine the rest of the ingredients for the dill and pine nut topping. Press the topping on the salmon, using the mustard to help it stick. Then bake in the oven for 12-15 minutes, depending on the thickness of the salmon, until the fish is flaky.
Plate up with your side salad adding a little extra lemon juice to your salmon. Serve optionally with seasonal vegetables and/or potato wedges.
