One Tray Salmon, Potato, and Broccoli Bake with Herbed Butter
Cooking with disability hacks is my jam. My traybake. My... I'll work on it.
Being disabled, I’m often too tired to cook a big meal or stand at the stove for an hour cooking while using multiple pans. All of my recipes are written with disabled cooks in mind, because they include the tricks and hacks I’ve had to come up with to modify the average recipe for my own abilities and limitations. Except traybakes. Traybakes are already pretty accessible. Traybakes are the disabled mum’s saviour.
*My roasting dish is not dirty, just well loved!
Actually, I tell I tiny lie - there are added disability hacks in this recipe, on top of an already pretty simple traybake method. I can’t help it! I want accessibility everywhere!!
This one is one of those dishes that I used to do in separate pans, which got a bit tiring and complicated towards the end. Putting it all in a tray, in stages, is a lifesaver.
You will need: A big roasting tray, a decent knife, a chopping board, a small mixing bowl, and spoon measurements (and an optional food processor)
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Ingredients
4 x 150g salmon fillets
1 head broccoli or 2 bunches broccolini
3-4 spring onions, optional
1kg washed baby potatoes
100g butter, softened
1/2 bunch parsley (about 1/2 cup)
1/2 bunch dill or 1/2 tsp dried dill
Rice bran oil or other neutral oil with a high smoke point
Method
Preheat your oven to 250C.
Slice the potatoes into rounds. Cut off the bits with eyes and discard. I never peel my potatoes because the skin is good for you! But I also always buy washed potatoes and not peel because my arthritic hands can’t handle it. A little disability hack for you there.
Rinse the potatoes. If you can’t pick up a bowl or pot full of water and potato to tip it all out, rinse them in the colander.
Boil the potato slices in salted water with 1/2 tsp bicarb. Boiling and bicarbing is not an essential step, but it means you are more likely to end up with crispy potatoes.
Tip the potatoes out on the chopping board to dry. If the steam gets trapped, it will mean your potatoes don’t crisp up. I mean we are adding ingredients on top while baking, which lessens the chance for crispness anyway, but you want to give them every chance, because crispy potatoes are life.
Put a small amount of rice bran oil in the roasting tray. You don’t want too much, because you’ll be adding butter to the tray later. Rice bran oil often comes in gigantic bottles. For ease of use for my disabled arms, I get help decanting it into one of those plastic squeezy bottles.
Mix the potatoes into the oil and season well. Roast for about 30 minutes or until they are just starting to brown. Now go sit down for a few minutes before the next step. You deserve it.
While the potatoes are cooking, slice your broccoli into florets.
Pinbone your salmon. Supermarket salmon sometimes still has small bones that need to be removed before eating. I use tweezers, but there are special pinbone tongs available. If you use tweezers, make sure you give them a good wash before and after (eyebrows in your salmon are not appealing, nor is salmon in your eyebrows, for that matter).
If this is too fiddly for your hands, you can get salmon from a fishmonger and ask them to pinbone it for you, or just cut the bones out with a small knife. You might lose a bit of flesh, but no bones is a win.
Pat the salmon skin dry. This will help the skin crisp up in the oven.
Season the skin well and put it back in the fridge to dry. All of this, plus the addition of a little oil later, will result in the sort of crispy skin you normally need a hot frypan for.
Chop your parsley. You only need about half to about two thirds of an average supermarket bunch. Save the rest for a soup or a stew (you can freeze it for these uses, if you don’t have one planned).
Cut it finely. The finer you chop it, the easier it is to mix into the butter. OR! You can use a food processor. Totally up to you.
Trim the spring onions of the ratty ends and dead stalks, if using.
Once the potatoes have been cooking for 30 minutes, add the spring onions (if using). Fold them up like lovely ribbons. Yes, mine are lovely. Shhhh.
Turn the oven down to 200C. Add the broccoli, spread out in a single layer. Put the roasting tray back in the oven and bake for another 15 minutes or until the broccoli starts to brown. Take 5 again. Maybe catch a bit of TV.
Mash the dill into the butter with a fork. If you’re not able to use your wrists, doing it in a food processor is fine.
Do the same with the parsley, in batches. It will look like the butter can’t take all that parsley, but it will (you can also do this in the food processor, but just keep in mind it will turn everything into a paste, the more you use it on the herb butter ingredients. Which is OK! But it may not be the texture you’re looking for).
Get the salmon out again and pat dry again. Season very lightly, just in case you have wiped all the salt off.
Divide your herb butter into four even piles, for applying to the flesh side of your salmon. I use the plastic trays the salmon come in to hold them while I apply the butter. It will be hard to do because the salmon is slimy! Kinda gross but true. It doesn’t matter if the butter doesn’t stick on it properly, because it will melt off and mix with the vegetables anyway. Mmmmmm, buttery.
Get the roasting tray out of the oven. Place the salmon, flesh side down, on top of the vegetables, with the herbed butter resting underneath. If it falls off, just stick it in the roasting dish.
Put a very small amount of oil on the salmon skin to help it crisp up.
Bake for another 15 minutes, or until the skin is crisp and the flesh is cooked. Halfway through, you might have to swap the inner pieces with the outer pieces of salmon, for even cooking. It depends on your oven!
Serve each piece of salmon with a spring onion each and a pile of broccoli and potato.
