Pesto Roasted Salmon with Creamy Courgettes, Peas and Butterbeans

The perfect midweek supper, healthy, quick and so delicious.

This is exactly the kind of dish I want to eat after a long day. Healthy but satisfying, quick and very delicious. What’s not to love?

These creamy butter beans are really good and whilst I love pasta, sometimes I crave the comfort that pasta brings but I want something a bit lighter. These are exactly that. Courgettes are at their best right now and you can pick up all sorts of gorgeous varieties - any will work here. Using vegetables when they are in season is the ultimate cooking hack - you have to do so little to them to make them taste amazing, they do so much of the heavy lifting for you! And I love this technique of pan frying the onions, garlic and courgette and then blitzing half of this with peas and creme fraiche to make a gorgeously silky sauce that then gets poured over the vegetables left in the pan. I love some of the vegetables still having a bit of chunk and texture to them whilst the others form the sauce.

If you’ve been here for a while you will remember that I’ve shared a crunchy salmon with green butterbeans before and this is a summery variation. That’s the fun thing about cooking, there are so many ways you can tweak a recipe and with just a few different ingredients suddenly it’s a completely different dish, delicious in its own right. I love that crunchy herby panko salmon from the previous recipe and that would also be really good with this. Here I’m using crispy onions sprinkled over the finished dish to provide a bit of crunch as you know I’m all about the contrast in textures. And it works so well. This is so so good.

If you want to make pesto for this occasion, this is my go-to recipe but I have to say for something like this where the pesto is being cooked, I more often than not get from the shops. Never the jars on the shelf but the pots from the fridge.