Stuffed Salmon for New Years Eve

We always stay in on New Years Eve as there aren't really any places close enough to home we want to walk to and taxi's are both hard to come by and expensive.  So we prefer a nice bottle or two of fizz and a nice dinner.

This year I was still fighting off an infection so dinner needed to be relatively easy to prepare but I still wanted something special.  We were going to have scallops to start but being in Sheffield and therefore many, many miles from either coastline fish is often not of the greatest quality here.  So I had to improvise on what was available and opted for stuffed salmon.

I simply bought two fillets and sandwiched them with a mixture of parsley, capers, black olives and lemon zest and baked in the oven for 12 minutes (turned out it should have been a bit longer as it was a bit "over-rare" in the middle!)   I made a hot dressing with some courgette cubes, concasse tomatoes olive oil, the juice from the lemon, sherry vinegar and a little honey to balance the sharpness, brought together with a little cold butter at the end.  Served with thin slices of fresh brown bread (not homemade as I have yet to conquer bread and hope to blog more about that in 2013 as it's my cooking goal for the year) and it was very delicious and a perfect light starter to kick off the evening.

Main course was fillet of beef with potato and celeriac dauphinoise with carrots and sugar snap peas in a red wine and shallot sauce (practically the same as last year but we love it and it's an expensive cut so still has to be saved for treats).